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Tljreescore Years aijd Ten. 



Far every mDod. the world is heed, 
And shaded from our awn." 



V 



^^Y A LA^^^YER. 




CINCINNATI: 

Elm Street Printing Company, Nos. 176 and 17S Elm Street. 

1884. 






Entered accordine- to Ant r.e n^ 

"ing to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, by 

C \V. HALL, f Vtv . 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C. 






ERRATA. 



PAGE LINE Read on title page "hued" for "heed." 

II 13, read "Maldrow" for "mulchous." 

28 13, read "fearfully" for "tearfully." 

45 2, read "brain" for "brethren." 

76 8 from bottom, read "saved" for "savable." 

81 9 from top, read "had" for "was." 

88 5 from top, read "rouse" for "use." 

95 16 from top, "1854" for "1834." 
116 2, after the words "Bell weakened" add "and." 

124 13 from top, a period at the work "neutral." 

125 3 from bottom, read "thrice" for "twice." 
127 3, for "slaved" read "slave." 

156 3 from bottom, for "John and Hugh Rupel, sons of 

Elijah Rupel" read "John and Hugh Russell, sons 
of Elijah Russell." 

158 12 from top, for "Lizemore" read "Sizemore." 

174 II from bottom, for "thumb" read "foot." 
176 9 from top, for "intolerance" read "tolerance." 

181 5 from top, for "Lizemore" read "Sizemore," also the 

nth, 15th, 20th, 22d, 25th, 27th, 28th, 29th lines. 

186 17, for "Lizemore" read "Sizemore." 

187 15, for "Gillen" read "Gillem," also i8th and 25th lines. 

188 I and 1 2th lines, for "Gillen" read "Gillem." 

189 9, for "granger" read "stranger." 

194 16, for "Troutman" read "The front man." 

194 21, for "mother" read "brother." 

196 17, for "Chop Lack" read "Choptack." 

197 3, for "Lizemore" read "Sizemore." 
200 II from bottom, for "on" read "or." 

210 12, Omit "so that for his whole term." 

211 last, for "one" read "two." 

213 top, for "viscerated" read "eviscerated." [athwart." 
223 4 from bottom, for "ruins and thwarts," read "runs 

226 II from bottom, read "nurture" for "nature." 
236 5 from bottom, read "aimed" instead of "tried." 

249 9 from bottom, omit the word "including." 

252 17, read "final" for "fine." 

253 8, read "poking" for "joking." 
258 II, read "risks" for "riots." 
261 4, period at the word "retain." 

263 7 from bottom, read "1864" for "1862." 

267 12 from bottom, read "vests" instead of "greets." 

268 12 from bottom, read "established" for "abolished." 
273 3 from bottom, read "properly" for "property." 

279 12 from bottom, read "Court of Claims." 

280 II from bottom, read "in" for "to." 
289 9, read "Judge" instead of "lawyer." 
295 17, read "disparity" for "depravity." 

299 4 from top, read "utterances" for "assurances." 

299 14 read, "morality" for "morally." 
301 7, read "me" for "the." 



PREFACE. 



The author said to a professional brother, ««I sometimeo think 
of writing a book." '^But, ad bono,'' the brother said, ♦' if your 
book shall be real, and not merely artificial, true to nature and 
facts, it may be useful." 

To represent human nature truthfully, its deep depravity must 
be made prominent. To heroize the devil is to exhibit a devilish 
spirit; to whitewash crime is to blacken the heart. Man's nat- 
ural selfishness and vanity prompt the concealment of his great- 
est deformities; and, as a consequence, one man can not dis- 
close the real character of another, except in general outline. 
Therefore the individual must reveal his individual character, if 
the nature is to be understood. It is true, as selfishness and 
vanity are the common traits of human nature, the individual 
may under their influences misrepresent himself. But there are 
apt to be hypercriticisms applied to such a work; and if there be 
any just reason to suspect falsehood, it will surely be discovered. 
The author's object has been to develop human nature, not in 
abstract speculations, but in the history of such facts of his own 
life as he has thought necessary to his object and proper to state; 
because example is more impressive than precept. 

(iii) 



iv PREFACE. 

Sugar-coated pills are prepared for little children and very 
delicate stomachs. If there be anything of the nature of a pill 
in this book, the reader will excuse the absence of the sugar- 
coating. Medicine taken straight is usually most efficient, but 
there is no malice at the bottom of the draught. 

Reader, trace this life; mark every step ; study its moral bear- 
ings. There are few things to imitate, many to warn and shun. 
May it help you to choose the good and reject the bad in your 
own life's record. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

Preface, ........ 3 

Contents, ....... 5 

Chapter I., 7 

Chapter II., . . . . . . . 11 

Chapter III., . . . . . . .17 

Chapter IV., 25 

Chapter V,, . . . . . . -31 

Chapter VI., 36 

Chapter VII., ....... 41 

Chapter VIII., 50 

Chapter IX., ....... 54 

Chapter X., . . . . . . . 61 

Chapter XI., ....... 70 

Chapter XII., 78 

Chapter XIII., 87 

Chapter XIV., 94 

Chapter XV., 103 

Chapter XVI., 108 

Chapter XVII., 126 

(V) 



VI CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

Chapter XVIII. , 131 

Chapter XIX., 138 

Chapter XX., 148 

Chapter XXL, 156 

Chapter XXII., 168 

Chapter XXIIL, 176 

Chapter XXIV., 189 

Chapter XXV., 199 

Chapter XXVI. , 216 

Chapter XXVII., 222 

Chapter XXVIII. , 229 

Chapter XXIX., .238 

Chapter XXX., ....;. 242 

Chapter XXXI., 256 

Chapter XXXII., 281 

Chapter XXXIII., 287 

Chapter XXXIV., 294 



Threescore Years ahd Tek 



CHAPTER I. 

Human life, the gift of God, was a rich endow- 
ment to the parents of the race. The rational 
soul, made in the image of its Creator, and placed 
in the most perfect of all material structures, was 
the last and noblest work of creation. And, 
though by a breach of plain duty they involved 
themselves and the generations of men in a com- 
mon condemnation, yet in the infinite wisdom and 
goodness of God the soul was not wholly extin- 
guished, nor the body immediately relegated to its 
original dust. A probation was granted, and will 
be extended to successive generations to the end 
of time, that the justice of the Lawgiver may be 
vindicated, and his wisdom and mercy, in the 
scheme of man's recovery, revealed. 

Man's soul is in a moral eclipse, and, as to the 
chief end of his creation (the glory of the Maker 
and his own blessedness), is in gross darkness, pre- 
ferring evil to good, wrong to right, and so wedded 

(7) 



8 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

to his delusion that no mere human power can dis- 
pel the darkness. If this were his unchangeable 
state, immortality would not be desirable; but, 
happily, there is hope for those who have, are, and 
shall be wise to embrace the remedy. In the lapsed 
state of humanity, birth is an awful event, little as 
the thoughtless world think of it. If it were a 
moth to bask in the balmy sunshine for a brief life 
of hours, or a lamb to gambol on the green lawn 
and live its short but useful day ; or if it were the 
eagle springing from her craggy nest, floating over 
the rough sea, holding in her talons the young 
eaglet to teach it how to fly, a sensitive mind 
would admire and wonder. They bask, or gam- 
bol, or fly their brief day and die, and are no 
more. Not so the child of man. Born to a short 
stay in this world, walking through sunshine and 
shadow, alternately laughing and weeping, joyful 
and sorrowful, healthful and sickly, until death of 
the body and an eternity of blessedness and misery 
beyond, no such other being is known in the uni- 
verse. The man of threescore years and ten, 
standing on the border line which runs between 
time and eternity, looks back to his earliest per- 
ceptions of life and traces, as in a panorama, the 
winding path he has trodden over hills, mountains, 
valleys, plains, rivers and seas in calms and tem- 
pest, in the school, in the college, in the law-office, 
in the courts, in the world, and writes upon all, 
"Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" — all is vanity. 
It is well to look back through the years, and, as 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 9 

from an open book, read lessons, learned through 
hopes and fears never realized, but ever recurring 
with the shifting scenes of life, and learn therefrom 
that life is an awful reality weighted with the bur- 
dens that must be borne on earth, and freighted 
with an endless joy or sorrow beyond. The time 
and circumstances of every birth have much to do 
with the after-life. It is true all are born upon 
an equality in the sense of the mode of birth. 
Infancy, youth, manhood, old age, flesh and 
blood, and a common mortality. But there is al- 
most illimitable diversity in the actual conditions 
of the members of the race at birth and childhood 
(with some exceptions), and this variety marked 
so early gives character and condition to the after- 
life. The immortal principle is the same in all 
human beings, but the medium of development 
of the soul has that characteristic which marks the 
individual of all varieties of species. It is adapted 
to a given plane or theater of action. The indi- 
vidual must work on that plane, act its part on 
that theater, and stand in its lot at the end of its 
days; that, when the vail which covers eternity 
shall be lifted, it may receive its reward according 
to its capacity and opportunities and their improve- 
ment. 

In this there is no fatalism. Man is neither a 
stock nor stone, but a free moral agent. His own 
consciousness reveals it. And it is this free agency 
which makes life an awful reality. Every man at 
death has made a character ; God has not made it 



lO THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

for him ; neither has the man made it independent 
of God. Let the serious reader ponder this truth, 
"that he hves, moves and has his being in God," 
and is subject to him. Yet he makes his own 
character, and, therefore, makes his own ultimate 
condition. ''For as the tree falleth, so it shall 
lie." When a man lives threescore years and ten, 
we suppose his observation and experience will 
furnish much of interest and instruction. And 
while the aged do not even imagine what they 
have seen or felt, have been so peculiar as not to 
have their synonym, yet the seeing and hearing, 
doing and feeling, of the individual himself, or, in 
connection with others, make the common expe- 
rience personal and interesting. Though we know 
all men must die, and any one may die at any mo- 
ment, yet how a sudden death of an acquaintance 
startles us. It makes the common experience per- 
sonal, and speaks to the heart, ''I, too, am mor- 
tal." 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN, II 



CHAPTER II. 

A NATIVE of Kentucky, his parents were poor, 
but respectable ; his father, a Presbyterian clergy- 
man, his mother a Christian woman of the same 
Church. His early childhood was passed in a log 
cabin; and his most distant memory recalls that 
little cabin with its hole in the wall, out of which 
he looked at break of day to see the wolves leap 
the yard fence as his father hastened with his 
rifle, snatched from the rack to shoot the escaping 
wild animals. He was not so fortunate in the shot 
at the wolves as he was sometimes afterwards, when 
he took his eldest son ''and coming man" upon 
a deer hunt with ''mulchous pack" and his own 
swift-footed greyhound, ''Music." The hunter's 
horn and the wild yelping of the pack soon 
started the chase ; Music, voiceless but swift, took 
the lead in sight of the chase, and over hill and 
hollow, through the wild forest, the stag and the 
slut kept equal pace with long and rapid strides, 
while the pack behind came yelping on. Father 
and son, standing on the bank of the rolling fork, 
looked across to the top of the hill and saw the 
stag bounding down the long slope with break- 
neck speed, and "Music" hard upon its rear, and 
plunging in its flight into the river the father 



i~ 



12 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

fired his trusty rifle ; almost at the instant " Music " 
sprang upon her prey, and the chase was over. 

The log cabin was after awhile left for a more 
pretentious habitation in a different neighborhood, 
a **hewn log-house with a broad opening between 
the pens." A chimney at either end, and a cellar, 
was a step forward in the scale of social position. 
From this new home * ' the coming man, " began his 
school life under the tuition of James Buchanan, 
afterwards Professor of Mathematics in Centre 
College. Here he acquired some rudimental 
knowledge of letters, as also of some vices. Un- 
happily the development of the intellect does not 
prevent the like development of human depravity. 
Indeed, a bad man's education in letters is often 
his greatest misfortune. The forger would never 
perpetrate the crime if he could not write. 
Knowledge is power, learning is admirable, and 
rightly used useful. Yet, if not directed by that 
wisdom which is the ''gift of God," ignorance may 
be better. The harangue from the hustings plat- 
form and legislative halls calling for education as 
the safety valve of our social and political life, is 
like the chimes of many city bells, varied and mu- 
sical. But is the voice of the *' Sweet Singer of 
Israel " heard ? Are the teachings of Israel's wisest 
king heeded? (s the word of "Him who spake 
as never man spake" the foundation of all Hterary 
and scientific instruction in the schools, colleges 
and universities? Unless this is so, all else is but 
the cultivation of man's powers for the service of 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 3 

the Devil. Human nature gravitates to the deepest 
gulf of sensual appetite. Worldly wisdom, which 
seeks to gratify man's natural propensities, only 
quickens the pace to the fatal end. But rural life 
and agriculture, with their moralizing influences, 
were not to be the lot and vocation of the young 
*'deer hunter." A still more pretentious habita- 
tion, in the near-by village, became the new home. 
Schools were kept up in the village, and some of 
the teachers are remembered with real affection; 
as Proctor, Charles Philips and James Buchanan. 
But one Irish Roman Catholic (embryo) priest, 
named Toland, ' ' by some means got the village 
school." Whether he had come to America from 
a potato patch, or a boy's reformatory school, or 
without any special antecedents, is not known. 
As the slave is often the hardest master, this man 
may have imbibed the spirit of tyranny from his 
experience or observation in his native land. One 
thing he taught efficiently — that authority, though 
small and brief, can make itself feared. The vow 
of celibacy, which cut him off from the love of 
woman, may have severed the cord that should 
have bound him to the race. His religious preju- 
dice may account for his want of sympathy with 
the children of Presbyterian families. For soon 
after his exit, a lively contest sprang up between 
the ''head centers of Romanism, (at St. Rose and 
St. Joseph's, ") 'and the said Presbyterian clergy- 
man, which culminated in a personal and eccle- 
siastical discussion at Bardstown; between the 



14 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

clergyman and the Roman bishop David, before a 
large audience. 

In that man Toland was seen the type of the 
Romish Church in all its past history. From the 
year 606, when the Emperor Phocas acknowl- 
edged the supremacy of the Popes, to Innocent the 
Third, who inaugurated the inquisition, and to the 
close of the eighteenth century, aggressive, insolv- 
ent and tyrannical in enforcing its false doctrines 
and practices upon the ignorant and credulous 
multitude, it has been and is the "Hand Maiden" 
of infidelity; and will in the end (if there be any 
fulfillment of prophecy, as now interpreted) be the 
open ally of Atheism. In this thought there is 
something for the people of the United States to 
consider. If Popery and infidelity are to be the 
force arrayed against the forces of the Christian 
Church in the final struggle between religious 
** truth and error;" and if these forces are to be 
physical, and the conflict between ''hosts of 
armed men;" and if the "twelve hundred and 
sixty years of the Apocalypse terminated in 1866," 
as ' ' Faber thought it would, and within seventy- 
five years from that period, this great and decisive 
battle must be fought (eleven years of which have 
already passed); and if emigration to the United 
States shall continue at the present rate, and Eu- 
rope and Asia throw off upon our shores "the 
Roman Catholic," "the Nihilist," "the Jacobin" 
and the Cummune, and thus sieve their popula- 
tions of their dregs and scum until we reach the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 5 

sum of "one hundred million in forty years" — 
where is this great battle more likely to be fought 
than (as Baldwin thought) in the valley of the 
Mississippi? Village life is a capital nursery for 
speeding the boy into the quasi man. Chewing 
tobacco and smoking cigars are men's habits, and 
display maturity, and the boy thinks dignity, and 
the woman has learned to imitate; thus by the ex- 
ample of father and mother is hastened the matur- 
ity of the children. Although neither of the boy's 
parents set him such an example, yet he became 
"manly" in these particulars, by his associations 
in village life. And while apt to learn letters, his 
aptitude for things less valuable did not suffer in 
the comparison. His growth in knowledge from 
books and the by-paths of village life, gave him a 
very mixed character. And but for the antidote 
of his loved mother's prayers and his father's earn- 
est exhortation and pungent discipline these "by- 
paths would have led him down to Hell." 

An incident will show the progress made at 
about eleven years of age. The village school 
had been left and the academy at Bardstown 
entered, home left and boarding obtained in the 
family of the Hon. Charles A. WickHff. (And 
here must be expressed the most grateful memory 
of that distinguished man and his most excellent 
wife.) The principal of the academy was reputed 
a good educator; his discipline was very rigid. 
On a bright autumn morning, on the way to the 
academy, news came of a "cock fight" at a little 



1 6 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

distance, and having a taste for that cruel sport, 
the boy of eleven diverged from the way to the 
academy and found himself on the battle ground 
of the "cocks." Thus the morning lessons were 
lost. In the afternoon the truant was called to ac- 
count, and he bears the marks of that settlement 
on his left shoulder to this day. Such severity 
created some excitement, and the boy was allowed 
by his father to remain at the academy or return 
home. Young as he was, he knew punishment 
was deserved, and chose to remain at school, and 
ever after, while there, was treated by the principal 
with much kindness. Here is seen the propensity 
to evil on the one hand, and the consciousness of 
right and duty on the other. This conflict has 
been kept up with alternate victories and defeats. 
His natural conscience and parental training by 
precept and example has kept up a constant war- 
fare against strong native inclination to evil. Let 
the young who read these lines, prize as the most 
valuable of all gifts, ''that moral sense which 
results from a conscience enlightened by religious 
truth, and a heart educated to Holy affections by 
Holy example." 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1/ 



CHAPTER III. 

What son or daughter ever appreciated an af- 
fectionate Christian mother until she was taken 
away, or who can value the loss to childhood and 
youth of such a mother? Who shall take her place 
to watch the wayward steps of childhood ? Whose 
heart shall, like a bubbling spring, continually 
swell and overflow in prayer and tears for those 
loved ones like hers? As mother and child is the 
nearest natural relation, so springs from it the 
deepest and most undying affection. But ''sad 
truth," there is a great disparity in the strength 
and durability of the mother's love and that of the 
child. While natural affection and gratitude should 
make the child's love of the mother the stronger, 
it generally, if not universally, is the weaker, as 
common observation proves. While the boy was 
less than fourteen years old his mother died, uttering 
with her last whisper the words of the disciple Thom- 
as, ''My Lord and my God," and, blessed faith, 
realized that, as she called him, he came and took 
her to his own heaven. This event marked an 
epoch in the boy's life. "There is no home with- 
out a mother." Being the eldest child, with three 
brothers and two sisters living, all younger than 
himself, and the father's ministerial duties often 

2 



1 8 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

calling him away, after a short effort to keep to- 
gether, necessity separated the children. But the 
father's heart was with his children, and a second 
marriage seemed a necessity. Having been invited 
to Lexington, he formed the acquaintance of a 
widow of some fortune (who had two sons by her 
former husband), and, in due time, a marriage was 
consummated between the clergyman and the 
widow. And, soon after, the clergyman was 
called to the First Presbyterian Church of that 
city, where he continued to minister about twenty- 
seven years. The scattered family were gathered 
to the beautiful home of the step-mother joining 
''Ashland," the home of the great and wise states- 
man, ''Henry Clay. " This was a wonderful tran- 
sition from the "log-cabin," with its hole in the 
wall, to the stately mansion with its "halls octa- 
"■on, and rotunda, circular drives, lawns and wood- 
lands." Thus, at that early age, "the coming man" 
had passed through three stages of social life (as 
the world calls it), and was now entering upon the 
fourth. 

The novelty of the change excited temporary 
interest, but, in the nature of things, this could 
not be home ; and a shifting, changeful life was to 
be his lot in his nonage. Eight miles northwest 
of Lexington the Rev. Robert Marshall ministered 
to a small church, and taught at his home. To 
this school the boy was sent, and happily lived in 
his family ; he was a learned and godly man. No 
better situation could have been selected by his 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 9 

affectionate father for his wayward son. And there 
is no memory of the boy's youth which brings 
more pleasant and profitable reflections to his mind 
than the time spent in the family and under the 
tuition and example of that revered and greatly 
esteemed man. Here the boy remained until ready 
to enter college. The University at Lexington, 
the chief literary institution of the State, was pre- 
sided over at that time by Dr. Horace Hawley. 
Though learned and accomplished, his religious 
opinions were not in harmony with the Presby- 
terianism of that day. In the meantime, an infant 
Presbyterian College had been organized at Dan- 
ville, called Centre College. In this institution 
James Buchanan, his first school-teacher, was Pro- 
fessor of Mathematics. To this institution the 
boy was sent, and entered the ''Sophomore Class." 
Through the fifteen years of his past life to his 
entering college, the boy's youth had been observ- 
ing, but not analyzing or comparing so as to shape 
his experiences into practical wisdom. Memory 
stored away passing events to be called up when 
the currents of life should flow less freely and the 
rush to reach manhood and maturity should be 
over. It would be treason against the sentiment 
of the nineteenth century to impeach the methods 
of popular education now in use. So much is 
promised towards the elevation of human charac- 
ter from expanded scientific knowledge, reforma- 
tion of morals, social and political security, that 
we are tempted to look upon our present educators 



20 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

and political teachers as leading the human mind 
out of its native darkness and the nation out of 
the wilderness of its ignorance. It may not be 
wise to attempt a comparison of literary, scientific 
and moral culture in "1800 and 1825." But if 
the instruction and discipline are of like character 
as then, the diligent student may become a Nathan 
L. Rice, a Joseph Holt or A. O. P. Nicholson. But 
useful knowledge is not always (perhaps not gen- 
erally) appreciated. Many, doubtless, go to liter- 
ary institutions more for the reputation of learning 
than the acquisition of useful knowledge. There 
is a small proportion of those who enter such in- 
stitutions who make such public demonstrations 
of knowledge above others as to vindicate the 
utility of their collegiate course. While at college 
the eccentricities which marked the youth's earlier 
experiences were more fully developed — with no 
special fondness for or aversion to books, but full 
of animal life, his studies were not allowed to in- 
terfere greatly with his social pleasures. Usually 
in his class, often with little preparation for its 
exercises, he managed to keep his place but with 
the loss of much precious time. The ball-room 
and social parties often kept him out and up to 
late hours, which, of necessity, made him a late 
riser from his slumbers. It was after an evening 
spent in this manner that his morning slumbers 
were disturbed by a very sedate and diligent fellow- 
student. The manner of the disturbance was not 
necessarily iiitentional, but such as to cause a re- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 21 

monstrance, which was met by insultincr language. 
Quick of temper, a blow was given, which, from 
the fall on the stairs, was dangerous. The injured 
student reported to the faculty, which resulted in 
the practical suspension of the offender from the 
college. This is just an illustration of the disci- 
pline of that institution at that early day in its 
history. It was a rebuke to that false pride which 
the example of Kentucky fathers had cultivated 
in their sons until the common sentiment amongst 
old and young was that ''words justified blows," 
and a young man who failed to strike when insulted 
was a coward. The boy's chivalry on that occasion 
was only an instance of the common practice of 
the chivalrous youth of his day. Bloody noses 
and battered ribs were the certificate usually ex- 
hibited of their honorable bearing. In the olden 
times men established their rights under the law 
by the gauge of battle, practically ''might made 
right." This rule of law probably grew out of 
the idea of a special providence overruling all 
things, and that providence would always vindi- 
cate the right by the result of the battle ; a very 
jejune conception of Divine providence if enter- 
tained, or did it spring out of the notion that 
physical power is an evidence of a higher nature 
— as the lion is called the king of the forest and 
sways his scepter over beasts. If so, does it fur- 
nish any evidence that man's physical organization 
is only the development of the monkey? Darwin's 
theory would have been more plausible if he had 



22 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

derived man from the lion. Even before entering 
college, ''the coming man" had shown some small 
manliness towards the fair flowers of his race, and 
with his college growth grew also his admiration 
of female society and beauty. Not much like an 
*'ourang-outang" himself {inaugre Darwin's idea of 
his development), his youthful gallantry was not 
repulsed so as to snub that vanity which a toler- 
able physique and shallow judgment generally 
allows a large margin. That he attained more 
character as a "beau" than a ''scholar," is not 
more than reaping as he had sown — a harvest of 
tares, cockle and cheat which feed memories, the 
natural product of such sowing and reaping. 
Though not guilty of the sacrifice of female chas- 
tity, heartaches and tears of tender natures are the 
common effects of false professions and broken 
promises. "Young man," hear and heed the 
warning; never profess what you do not upon 
deliberation feel, and never promise that which 
you can not, or will not, perform. 

While at college, he knew a young man who 
made the acquaintance of a very handsome young 
lady of excellent family and social position. At a 
Thespian recital, fascinated with her, he attended 
her home, and very soon after made formal pro- 
fessions of love to her. An engagement, as it was 
called, soon followed. The young man continued 
his attentions to this fair, trusting and loving girl 
while he remained at college, and promised when 
he should have completed his professional studies 



THREESCORE YE4RS AND TEN. 23 

to return and make her his wife. He went away 
and, after a time, met with another beauty which 
developed the shallowness of his nature. He made 
love to her, and made an engagement with her 
also. Before he had obtained his professional li- 
cense, business required him to pass through the 
town where his first affianced lived, and it so hap- 
pened that he saw her on the street and she recog- 
nized him. Confused, and skulking from an inter- 
view, he hurried to get out of her sight, which she 
saw, and uttered a cry which went through him like 
a shot from a rifle. And while his mean and cow- 
ardly spirit made him fly from her, his conscience 
gored him as with a red-hot iron. Not very long 
after, this young man's second engagement was 
abandoned, and a third, a fourth, perhaps more, 
made, and all, like the first, dropped. Some years 
after he was licensed as a professional man, his 
business required him to go into the lower counties 
of the State. At one of the county towns, he 
went after night to see a lawyer resident there, in 
whose parlor, much to his surprise and confusion, 
he saw her to whom he had first, while at college, 
plighted his faith. Her pride and self-respect kept 
her silent, and he dared not recognize her. Next 
morning she sent a message to him to come to see 
her, but his cowardly heart prompted a lying ex- 
cuse and he went away. Two years afterwards he 
passed through the same town and intended to 
visit her, inquired for her, and learned she was 
dead. That young man carried with him ever 



24 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

afterwards a remorse which, but for the shallow- 
ness of his nature, would have been unbearable. 
This was a crime ; not the legal crime of seduction, 
but moral perjury and cruelty. The man, old or 
young, who will win the affections of a tender, 
confiding and loving heart, and be false to such a 
heart, is a ''monster, and nothing but the deprav- 
ity of human nature and the domination of the 
male race prevents its punishment as a legal crime 
nearly allied to murder." In the sight of that 
' ' great King, before whom all must stand at last, 
such crime shall meet its reward." Let me entreat 
young men to beware of trifling with such affec- 
tions. Love all virtuous young ladies as your sis- 
ters, and let no false whisper ever escape your lips 
to cause them sorrow. Remember, she is the 
weaker and you the stronger. Would you be 
wiUing to see your little sister beguiled into an 
unrequited affection by some gay and wayward 
youth? The tears of innocent and true love be- 
trayed are bottled up in heaven, and may be pour- 
ed out in burning waters upon the ''betrayer in 
the great reckoning." 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2^ 



CHAPTER IV. 

Kentucky chivalry having brought him into 
disgrace, college life was over. A profession must 
be chosen. Though designed by his father for the 
Christian ministry, not only for the intrinsic excel- 
lency of the calling, but, it may be, to keep up a 
succession in the family to the fourth generation — 
the great-grandfather having been a minister of the 
Church of England; the grandfather a Baptist 
minister, and the father a Presbyterian minister — 
but while a mere lad he acquired some taste for the 
legal profession. 

In the village before mentioned, two important 
criminal cases were tried in the Circuit Court which 
greatly interested him. An aged father, named 
Rivers, became intoxicated, went home in that 
condition, quarreled with his aged wife and at- 
tempted to use violence on her, when his son, a 
young man, interposed to protect his mother. The 
drunken father turned upon the son, who retreated 
out of the house, across the yard and, as he at- 
tempted to escape across the yard-fence, the father 
plunged his knife into his side and killed him on 
the spot. Judge Kelley presided ; William Booker, 
Esq., prosecuted, and the old man was defended 
by John Hays, one of the most eloquent men at 
3 



26 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the bar at that day. Notwithstanding Hays made 
a most pathetic argument upon the false ground 
of self-defense, the jury returned a verdict of mur- 
der in the first degree, and the old man was sen- 
tenced to be hanged. The Romish priest adminis- 
tered to him in prison according to the rites of that 
Church, and, on the morning of the execution, it 
was said his spiritual ministry took the form of ap- 
ple jack or corn whisky, and so he was executed. 
The father of the w^ould-be lawyer had a 
brother-in-law who was a distinguished politician 
and advocate. The way was thus open to the 
young man; under these auspices he took up 
Blackstone. His preceptor was not only a law- 
yer but a politician, and at that time a member of 
the Senate of Kentucky ; and as there were several 
political questions then hotly discussed, in which 
the Senator must take part, and having lost his 
right hand, the student became his amanuensis and 
wrote from his dictation, thus mixing law and pol- 
itics in the very start of his professional life ; and 
as the practice of politics required no special cer- 
tificate (of honesty, probity and good demeanor) 
or a sanction under the hands of two judges, his 
politics got ahead of his law. Thus for months 
this dual employment of learning that ' ' law is a rule 
of conduct" on the one hand, and discussing relief 
laws, banking, old and new courts, federalism 
and democracy on the other, the student, as his 
preceptor thought, had developed more genius 
for the life of a sailor than a lawyer. He there- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2/ 

upon proposed to procure a commission as 
midshipman in the navy for him from his brother- 
in-law, J. O. Adams, at that time President of the 
United States. To this the student assented with- 
out consulting his father, as he should have done. 
Within a very short time said commission came 
from Sam'l Southard, Secretary of the Navy. The 
Senator was required to go to Frankfort, Ky. , as 
the Legislature was about to meet. The student, 
alias midshipman, wished to return to his father's 
at Lexington, to let him know of this revolution 
in his plan of life. So the Senator and midship- 
man started, going by Louisville, reached Frankfort 
on the night before the meeting of the Legislature ; 
they lodged at the principal hotel, called the Man- 
sion House. When the servant came up to kindle 
the fire in the morning, they were startled by his 
statement that Col. Sharp was dead; had been 
assassinated at his home. Hurrying to the street, 
they found it thronged with excited crowds. Col. 
Sharp had been a prominent lawyer in Frankfort 
and one of the chief leaders and supporters of the 
relief, or new court party; and it was suspected 
by some of his friends that his death was a politi- 
cal murder. This idea was soon dispelled. Dr. 
Sharp, brother of the murdered man, suspected 
the murder to have been committed by Jeroboam 
O. Beauchamp ; and in the course of the morning 
it was ascertained that Beauchamp had lodged that 
night at ''Scotts," near the penitentiary, and had 
left very early that morning. A party of horse- 



28 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

men started in pursuit, and came in sight of him 
as he came in sight of his wife at his distant home, 
and saw him raise the token of his success. He 
was arrested and brought to Frankfort, and the 
student's preceptor (the Senator) was employed 
as his counsel and defended him on his trial. 

This transaction with its tragic close has been 
dramatized, but the story is a short one. Sharp 
had won the heart of Miss Cook and married 
another. Miss Cook resolved on revenge. When 
Beauchamp proposed marriage to her she con- 
s'ented upon condition he should kill Sharp. He 
agreed, and executed his marriage contract. Tear- 
fully did Sharp pay for his perfidy, and most fear- 
fully did this deluded woman and her husband 
pay for her revenge. Leaving Frankfort on that 
day, the newly fledged midshipman hurried to 
Lexington to see his venerated father, somewhat 
doubtful of the reception he should meet. Still 
under lawful age, his father might interdict his new 
plan; and might justly be offended that he had 
not been consulted. Reaching home unlooked 
for, some surprise was created. The commission 
was duly exhibited. Instead of sharpness and 
rebuke, the idea of such a life for his son broke 
his father completely down. "My son," said he, 
*'I can not consent that you shall go to sea; it is 
a life of dissipation and wickedness, and would be 
your eternal ruin. I would regard you as lost." 

Rebuked and subdued, as well by the tenderness 
of his manner and his evident solicitude for his 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2g 

son's safety and welfare, the son could make no 
answer. He was disappointed and felt his situa- 
tion embarrassing. Very soon an order came 
from the Navy Department, commanding him to 
report to Commodore Ridgely, off Pensacola, for 
duty. The crisis had come; desiring to go to 
gratify love of adventure and a sort of wild ambi- 
tion, yet the son could not break over his father's 
remonstrance and authority, and finally resigned 
his commission. This was a most judicious step, 
for with his high temperament and the common 
practice of dueling in the navy at that day, he 
would probably have fallen himself, or committed 
murder by that barbarous custom. So the quan- 
dam midshipman became again the plain student 
of the mysteries of English and American juris- 
prudence, under the instruction of Gen'l Robert 
B. McAfee, then Lieut. Governor of Kentucky, 
and author of **War in the West in 1812." This 
new arrangement brought him in close contiguity 
to the late most pious Rev. Thomas C. Cleland, 
D. D., who had performed the marriage ceremony 
of the student's parents, and preached the funeral 
sermon of his sainted mother. The student 
became a constant hearer of his most earnest and 
eloquent sermons ; and had the benefit of his wise 
and paternal counsel while he continued his stud- 
ies. One of the lessons learned from him was, 
**that little things are little things; that pigmies 
perched on Alps are pigmies still ; and pyra- 
mids are pyramids in vales. " This aphorism has its 



30 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

illustration in all departments of political, profes- 
sional or social life, but the world does not act 
upon its truth. Men love to be humbugged. The 
fool loves to be told he is wise, and he believes it. 
The people love to be told they knozv it all. And 
the man that tells them so is the people's man ; and 
he may just have sense enough to know that little 
speech will win popular favor. So that the pigmy 
on the Alps may be higher than the pyramid after 
all. In the human mind there is a proneness to 
estimate things according to surface measure. 
Littleness and greatness are positive terms; but as 
applied to mental and moral forces are extensively 
relative. True greatness is always found in com- 
pany with true goodness. Littleness may always 
be known by its modes and ends. To seek the 
glory of the Creator and the happiness of the 
rational creature is the sum of all true greatness. 
To attempt to dethrone the Deity and destroy the 
Christian hope is the sum of all littleness. How 
do the Apostle Paul and Robt. Ingersoll illustrate 
this truth ? 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 3 1 



CHAPTER V. 

While pursuing his professional studies, under 
the direction of that noble old General R. B. 
McAfee, the student had an opportunity to learn 
a little practice in the matter of taking testimony. 
A Mr. Boyce had a suit pending on account of 
defect in certain property bought by him, in which 
it became necessary that he should have the evi- 
dence of Col. Beaufort, of Laurel County, and 
the young student was employed to take his 
deposition. 

Leaving Stanford, in Lincoln County, before 
sunrise, and entering a long stretch of road thickly 
shaded on either side by dark forests, he saw, in 
the dim distance, a man coming. When near 
enough to distinguish him his appearance was very 
striking. A colossal figure in rough garments, 
with face concealed by an old hat, and his huge 
head bowed toward the ground ; and his walk, that 
of a man intoxicated. At that early hour his ap- 
pearance and manner excited surprise, and mis- 
trust that all was not right with him. The student, 
well mounted but unarmed, watched the strange 
figure walking in the center of the road and 
seeming to take no notice of him. He turned his 
noble horse out of the way, and when just passing 



32 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

a few Steps apart, the figure suddenly stopped 
and fiercely cried, *'Stop !" The student answered, 
"Goto town and get more whisky!" supposing 
him to be drunk; and while his horse quickened 
his pace the figure stood silently looking after 
him until lost in the distance. The student stopped 
at "Mount Vernon" for breakfast and mentioned 
to Mr Shelton, the inn-keeper, the incident of the 
morning. Mr. Shelton, in much excitement, im- 
mediately said, "That was Owsley; he is a mad- 
man and loose ; doubtless has broken out of his 
confinement, where he has been kept chained to 
the floor. A short time ago a negro boy went to 
make his fire, incautiously went too near him, when 
the maniac snatched a billet of wood from his arm 
and killed him on the spot." The student then 
began to feel alarmed. Indeed, if this madman 
had been met under different circumstances" the 
student would not have been on his guard. The 
residence of Col. Beaufort was reached, the depo- 
sition taken, and the student, returning to Stan- 
ford, learned that Owsley (for it was he) had 
gone into Stanford that morning, cleared the 
streets, marched up and down, raging like an 
uncaged wild beast. At length some brave young 
men (,Hunton and Logan) armed themselves, and, 
going into the streets, met the madman, and, under 
cover of their guns, compelled him to surrender. 
They secured him and took him back to his cottage 
and his chains. Several years afterwards the 
student passed by the place of that unhappy man's 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 33 

confinement and learned that he was dead. He 
was the brother of the then "Judge Owsley, of 
the Supreme Court of Kentucky," and a promising 
young man ; but became attached to a young lady 
who did not reciprocate the sentiment, and, having 
strong impulses springing from an ardent nature, 
the strain upon his nerves overthrew his reason. 
The meeting wath that wild man, of gigantic stature 
and fierce irrational spirit, at that early hour in 
that dark wood alone, and distant from any human 
habitation, with no knowledge of his history or 
character, has often been the subject of thought 
through all the past years. Was that meeting 
accidental? Yes, as to the madman and the 
student. Not to God, who had brought that 
youth unconsciously within a step of death that 
he might afterwards see the hand of a Divine 
Providence in his escape from the **real, though 
unknown, danger." 

Those who deny the doctrine of a special provi- 
dence may take this incident as an argument 
against, them, and answer it if they can. The 
sense of a divine presence, in every event of life, 
should be cultivated, not as an imagination but 
a blessed reality. Many deny the doctrine, but 
few the fact. The professed skeptic, in the face 
of great present danger, instinctively turns his 
thought to God as his only help or his dreaded 
avenger present in the sickness incurable, in the 
flood, in the storm that sweeps him away. The 
rational soul, under the influences of its native de- 



34 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

pravity, may take pleasure in the play of its 
powers, to feed an ambition to appear what it is not 
in the vain attempt to vindicate error and van- 
quish truth. But such intellect only communes 
with the baser sensibilities which gravitate down- 
ward always. But danger which ushers death, 
flashes the truth with electric light and force 
upon the soul, and its base illusion is gone. To 
deny a special providence is to deny any and all 
providence, which is practical atheism. May it not 
be doubted whether there be, in the proper sense 
of the word, an atheist in the world? Is not all 
professed ''skepticism the result of an inordinate 
vanity to appear learned and wise on the one hand, 
or the dread of that responsibility which attaches 
to broken law on the other. What a lesson does 
the life of Voltaire teach upon these points. A 
mind naturally gifted elaborately, cultivated in the 
knowledge of worldly things, with a tongue of 
silver *'and a pen of fire," he set ablaze the 
mind of that volatile people which culminated in 
the infidelity and blood of the French Revolution. 
What was the end? A death-bed of woeful confes- 
sion and horrible despair. It may be true that, 
prompted by vanity or fear, men may adopt and 
cultivate false theories, and continue to teach and 
practice them until, by habit, the mind loses its 
power to perceive the truth. And may not this 
be the meaning of that awful utterance, "Ephraim 
is joined to his idols, let him alone?" Fearful is 
the risk when the mind begins to dally with error 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 35 

that it will be swept into an unfathomable gulf into 
which the sun will never shine. '' Men love dark- 
ness rather than light." Why? ''Because their 
deeds are evil." It is an absolute truth, verified 
by experience and observation, that the man who 
thinks aright, feels aright and acts aright can not 
be an infidel. *'He who spake as never man 
spake " declared, ''If any man will do His will he 
shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." 
If it is asked. Who shall be the judge of what is 
right? it is answered, man's conscience, before he 
has educated it to keep silent when he does wrong. 
It is neither man's intellect or his will, abstractly, 
which prompts him to wrong. His depraved 
sensiblities captivate both, and chain them to their 
pleasures and pursuits. The education of the 
heart is of vastly more importance than the culti- 
vation of the intellect. To what extent do our 
educators appreciate this truth? are our schools 
and higher institutions of learning training our 
youth to intellectual greatness or moral goodness? 
Are they schooling the head at the expense of the 
heart, or in inordinate proportions according to 
the relative value ? The world will not grow better 
until this thought is appreciated and practically 
enforced, in putting the moral nature in advance, 
"its lawful place." The Bible should be every 
child's first reader, that it may learn the sparrow 
falls not without the knowledge of Him who 
numbers the hairs of the child's head. 



36 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER VI. 

On the twenty-second' of August, 1827, the 
student was licensed to practice law in the State 
of Kentucky. ''This formality took place at Har- 
rodsburg, Mercer County, within twelve miles of 
the place where he was born. " Judges Bridges and 
Hickey, honorable and able men, set him afloat 
on the rough sea of "lawyer life." And with 
little knowledge of professional navigation, with 
such compass and rudder as he had, he steered his 
little venture into several latitudes in search of a 
commodious harbor. Green River had some good 
landings for small vessels; and Hopkinsville, 
Russellville and Glasgow were prospected, but no 
sufficient room for his craft, which seemed to have 
grown in dimensions with the progress of his voy- 
age. Fond of adventure and novelties, while 
in this region he visited the far-famed ' ' Mammoth 
Cave," in company with Dr. Bell and a guide. 
With torches, the descent was made into the 
first avenue, which, at its end, opened into a vast 
hall whose top could not be seen, and whose 
bottom was marked, on one side, by a cart road, 
upon which the prints of wheels, made in 1807, 
were plainly visible. And against the huge per- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 3/ 

pendicular rock, which formed the wall, sat an ox- 
trough in which were relics of the food said to 
have been fed to oxen twenty years before, while 
employed in the manufacture of saltpetre, the 
vats for which were arranged in the opposite side 
of the hall in full view, but in ruins. Across one 
of these vats the guide in front passed the trio, 
and ascending upon a short ladder, upon hands 
and feet, entered the "Haunted Chamber." And 
truly, it was dark and rough enough to have been 
the road to Tophit; but too narrow for that much 
thronged throughfare. Gradually wider and 
smoother the way was easier, as the first crime 
committed cramps and roughs the conscience of 
the young sinner, but habit makes sin easier and 
the conscience calmer. Haunted this cavern had 
been by many living spirits, as their names on the 
low vault marked by the torch flame testified. 
Whether demons dwelt or visited there is not 
known. But the echoes starting sharp and shrill 
reverberated in thunder tones, and through the 
impenetrable darkness to unknown depth, and 
were lost in a whispered wail. A vivid imagination 
might conceive it the utterance of a departed spirit, 
and this may have given name to the dark, rough 
dangerous subterraneous cavern, its length and 
depth unexplored. Passing by many embryo for- 
mations from water and sand falling by the drop, 
"Devil's Arm Chair" presented, a curious con- 
catenation of the droppings, as though designed 
for his infernal majesty's rest. But its roughness 



38 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

plainly showed it could not be pleasant, even to 
him, according to the world's idea of pleasure. 

The devil is not supposed to have the power of 
ubiquity, and there is no reason to suppose he ever 
occupied that seat. But all the surroundings are 
well adapted to impress the mind with the black- 
ness of that darkness and desolation which mark 
the bottomless pit, into which Rebel Angels were 
plunged with the force of omnipotence from their 
native heaven. Dr. Bell had explored this cavern 
much beyond this point. Leaving the guide and 
young lawyer to follow, he went forward and 
suddenly disappeared. Where was he? What 
had become of him ? Had his torch gone out, or 
had he stepped into some chasm and fallen beyond 
sight or sound? Excited, not waiting for the 
guide, the youth rushed on to find himself almost 
jammed between huge rocks, filling up the way, 
except a winding pass and space for one man ; 
hastening rather slowly through this tortuous 
narrow space, suddenly a bright light shone out 
in front and the shrill cry of "Stop ! stop ! " broke 
on his ear. Instantly he was on the threshold of 
an awful gulf. Starting back to shun the horrible 
plunge, he saw Dr. Bell standing on the other side 
of the fearful chasm holding high his torch, which 
revealed the yawning mouth of the traditional 
** Lover's Leap." The surprise and apparent 
danger over, *'How was Dr. Bell's position to be 
reached?" On the right opened this by-way to 
Hades, and close on its left border continued the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 39 

huge rock, along the base of which there was 
a very narrow path inchned at an angle of several 
degrees toward the chasm. Along this the young 
lawyer must go, holding to the rocks by placing 
the ends of his fingers in the little uneven places 
upon its surface. He passed and then sounded 
the depths by throwing in stones, which, like the 
echoes, sounded deeper and more faint until lost. 
Tradition says a hopeless lover in company, 
perhaps, with the loved one and others, reaching 
this place, in despair leaped into the abyss, a 
sacrifice to his own vehement passion. From this 
point the space widened until a vast conical rock 
in the center of the way was reached. A passway 
around it revealed its rotund and sloping form. It 
is not probable that this is the place described by 
Gallaher in his work entitled "Adam and David," 
where Lucifer held his grand ** council." It 
seemed more fitted to the gathering of the infernals 
to their feasts, and, therefore, had the "sobriquet" 
of the "Devil's Dining Table." And there was 
homogeneity in this name, and the clear, broad, 
deep pool of water a short distance beyond, called 
the "Devil's Frying Pan." These names indicate, 
in imagination, that devils were not strangers in 
these parts. The guide stated the party had 
reached the distance of three miles and a half from 
the entrance, how far below the surface of the 
earth was unknown. It was said the Cave had 
been explored thirteen miles and was supposed to 
run under "Green River." Youthful curiosity did 



40 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

not urge a longer walk in such midnight darkness, 
and though the air was of most exhilarating fresh- 
ness and no sense of fatigue experienced, neither 
of the party were familiar with the cavern beyond. 
Turning back to retrace the path they had trodden, 
stopping now and then to start the echoes by 
stamping the earth, to hear the roar as of smoth- 
ered volcanoes, or calling aloud to imaginary invisible 
inhabitants to have their words thrown back upon 
their ears as though in anger or mockery, the 
entrance was regained. Four hours had been 
spent in darkness, only relieved by flickering torches 
which, while they showed the dim way, made the 
surroundings more gloomy and sepulchral. So 
that the sunlight, when first seen shining on the 
margin covered with wild flowers, presented a 
beauty and glory never before witnessed by the 
youthful ''adventurer.'" Can not a parallel be 
found to the incidents crowded into these four 
hours? In the spiritual lives of many, first impres- 
sions of spiritual things are like the torch light 
in the midst of the soul's native darkness. Earnest 
thoughts discover great gulfs and fearful caverns 
into which the soul looks, and fears to fall. But 
when the light, which radiates from the ''Eternal 
Throne" through the Holy Book, shines upon the 
soul, a beauty and glory is both seen and felt, some- 
times like the sudden blaze of the sun from a 
darkened sky, or as "St. Paul" says, "A light 
above the brightness of the sun," so vivid as to 
suspend his natural sight. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 4 1 



CHAPTER VII. 

Within twelve miles of Frankfort, the capital 
of the State, is the town of Lawrenceburg, then 
a small village, the county-seat of Anderson Coun- 
ty. Here the young- lawyer halted on his return, 
as it was a new county, and that ubiquitous nec- 
essary evil, the lawyer, had not yet become a 
multitude in the place; it was, at least, an ap- 
parent vacancy. The buildings in the village did 
not show any advanced knowledge of architec- 
ture, and its contiguity to the Salt River hills, 
whose population were known by the very charac- 
teristic name of ''Salt River Tigers," on court-day 
gave the town a very primitive outlook. That 
early settler in all new towns, the ''whisky shop," 
had there been located, and the "Tigers," when 
in town with divers denizens, had much business 
in and around that "hole to ruin." The member 
of the great United States Congress from that 
district lived hard by, plying his vocation of coz- 
ening the voters; he met a huge, black-whisker- 
ed, Salt-River-hill man, in this rendezvous of the 
lovers of corn-juice distilled, and, after several 
large potations, which stimulated their imaginations 
until each thought himself the "hub of the dis- 
trict," the member experimented on the head of 
4 



42 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEX. 

the Tiger by smashing a large, brown, earthen 
dish on its top ; but when the Tiger was about to 
crush the larger and smaller bones of the member 
of the "great Congress," his constituency came to 
his rescue and saved him for further service to his 
beloved country. The only regret that the Tiger 
expressed was that the Congressman had struck 
him with that inferior metal. 

An episode of similar character gave the young 
lawyer his first case. The point in the case was 
who struck first, and the young advocate based 
the defense of his client upon the fact that 
he had given his antagonist "two black eyes." 
The victor was the popular favorite, and, as law 
was rather an abstraction in that locality, prowess 
was proof in the support of the plea not guilty. 
Muscle was the medium of escape then; "money 
now." A court-day without some such pastime 
was an exception, not the rule, in that rough com- 
munity. That the young advocate should be sin- 
gular in this respect was not in keeping with his 
antecedents or his present associations. Sitting in 
the bar before the Court opened, a club was sud- 
denly swung over his head with full intent to try 
the strength of his cranium ; seeing it and catching 
it, with all his force he wrenched it from the hand 
of his assailant, and, according to well-established 
custom proceeded to the administration of the law 
of the place. The assault had been provoked by 
contemptuous epithets previously thrown at the 
young assailant, who was really more worthy in 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 43 

every virtuous aspect than the assailed, who de- 
served what was intended for him. 

Twenty miles off was Lexington, and while the 
father ministered to his flock, he kept a watchful 
eye upon his impulsive son. A continued resi- 
dence at Lawrenceburg, with its associations, was 
not calculated to improve the young man's morals 
or manners. The thoughtful father called upon 
his friend, Hon. W. T. Barry, the distinguished 
orator and advocate, well known in public life, 
residing at Lexington, and arranged with him to 
open an office at Versailles, Woodford County, 
Ky. , which the son should occupy as partner in 
that county. Thereupon the young lawyer trans- 
ferred himself to Versailles, and boarded in the 
family of a Scotch Presbyterian, who, though un- 
married, loved his fellow-men for his Savior's sake. 
This family consisted of an aged sister, also un- 
married, and three orphan children of a dead rel- 
ative. Mr. McFarland was a merchant in affluent 
circumstances. Here the young man found a 
paternal roof and lovely home, and the members 
of this family are embalmed in most sacred mem- 
ories. General Isaac Shelby, famous as one of 
the heroes of King's Mountain and the Thames, 
and Governor of Kentucky, formerly resided near 
Bristol, East Tennessee (through which the State 
line of Virginia and Tennessee runs), and removed 
to Kentucky, near Danville. Rev. Samuel Kelsey 
Nelson married one of his daughters. Mr. Nelson 
was brother to the great and widely useful Dr. 



44 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

David Nelson, who for some years practiced med- 
icine in and around Jonesborough, East Tennessee, 
where he married Miss Amanda Deadrick, sister 
of the present Chief-Justice of Tennessee, Hon. 
J. W. Deadrick. Having embraced Christianity, 
he carried with him through Hfe a devotion to his 
Master's cause and work rarely equaled, perhaps 
never excelled. His ministerial labors left their 
impress upon every community where bestowed, 
and his work on the "Cause and Cure of Infidel- 
ity" is still speaking to the understanding and 
heart of the multitude. Upon the death of his 
brother Samuel, who died in Florida while on a 
mission of charity. Dr. David Nelson was called 
to his deceased brother's church at Danville. Rev. 
Samuel Kelsey Nelson and the young lawyer's 
father were not only ministers of the same Church, 
but intimate friends for many years. That there 
should be affinity between the '* Lexington pastor 
and Dr. David Nelson was natural." 

In the summer of 1828 these two clergymen 
arranged a series of sacramental meetings, one of 
which was at Versailles. They commenced the 
meetings with a sermon by Dr. Nelson ; at night, 
an address by Dr. Nelson standing in the front 
seat, followed by an exhortation from the Lexing- 
ton minister. The effect was visible. No two 
men could be more diverse in their modes, and no 
two more fitted for the joint-work in which they 
were then engaged. Dr. Nelson calm, earnest, 
original, argumentative, illustrative; he addressed 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 45 

the understanding and forced the ascent of the 
mind. The other, charging the brethren with 
the magnetism of his voice and manner, drove it 
into the sinner's heart, extorting the cry, * ' What 
must I do to be saved?" Men mature and strong 
fell under the power of the Spirit through these 
means. The young lawyer was deeply impressed, 
mainly from the representation of the "love of 
God" in the life and death of Jesus the Christ. 

If God made man he must love the work of his 
own hands. The life and death of Jesus must 
have had an object. Every man's consciousness 
reveals the fact that he is out of harmony with his 
Maker. The Bible declares that Jesus was 
anointed to restore this harmony ; mere man could 
not do it. A murderer can not be justified before 
the law because he is sorry for the act, the penalty 
is in the way ; and in the penalty lies the general 
guilt. Man's relief must come from his '* Maker," 
if at all. It comes through the life and death 
of Jesus as man's substitute. God's love alone 
could have prompted the substitution of such a 
person for such an object. The substitute must be 
more than man in his fallen state and by ordinary 
generation, otherwise his own guilt must exhaust 
the penalty. The Son of God **was made in the 
likeness of man," but not as a mere man, else he 
could not be a substitute. He was the son of man 
by his mother of blessed memory; but the Son 
of God by the *'Holy Spirit," sinless, yet suffer- 
ing, beyond the conception of the finite mind, 



46 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

' ' because God laid upon him the iniquity of us 
all." The door of mercy was opened and pardon 
offered to the "Chief of sinners." This love of 
God began to be apprehended dimly by the young 
man. 

But notwithstanding his religious education 
there was a darkness in his mind that could be felt 
He had read portions of the Bible and heard it 
read from his infancy, and had committed to 
memory all the Shorter Catechism, yet he knew 
almost nothing about its spiritual meaning. He 
was anxious. He was told to come to Christ, but 
how? He was told to believe in Christ. * 'What must 
he believe?" That the man Jesus lived in Judea 
eighteen hundred years ago ; * ' that he was the son 
of a virgin; that he came to save sinners;" that 
his life was spotless and pure ; that he died on the 
cross and arose from the grave three days after- 
wards; and that all that believed would be 
saved. Christian doctrine, thus formulated, had 
been taught him by his parents, and he thought he 
believed ; but he was not a Christian. He con- 
tinued in this state of mind through the meeting. 
From Versailles they went to Shelbyville, and the 
young man was taken along. There, as at the 
former place, the community was stirred and many 
made profession of religion. Amongst others, 
Henry Crittenden, Esq., brother, of the Hon. 
John J. Crittenden, of national fame. While at 
Shelbyville the young man's mental exercises were 
like these: "Where is God? when I attempt to 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 4/ 

pray what conception can I form of him? It is 
hke praying to vacancy." His step-brother, a 
student of theology, was there and was asked, 
**What idea of God is in your mind when you 
pray?" No satisfactory answer was given. **What 
will be the consequence in a worldly point of view 
if I join the church? Will it preserve me from 
conflicts in the world?" Before the close of the 
meetings the young man determined to join the 
church without such full and clear apprehension of 
the nature and responsibility of the act as he 
should have had ; yet he had a desire to be religious 
and never afterwards entirely lost it. Whether he 
was then regenerated or not he has never known. 
Much of his life, for ten years afterwards, tended 
to prove he was not. His conviction of sin re- 
mained with many repentings and feeble efforts to 
pray, which was not entirely abandoned ; yet he 
committed many gross sins utterly inconsistent 
with true piety. In short, he professed religion, 
but had no well defined perception of possessing it. 
In the progress of these religious meetings several 
other young men had joined the church. Several 
of them had expressed a desire to preach. The 
young lawyer's father hoped his son would give up 
law and embrace the higher calling of the Christian 
ministry. Having been at Versailles a very short 
time, no professional business had accumulated, 
and being yet under twenty-one years of age and 
his mind unsettled, at the instance of his friends 
he entered into an arrangement with four other 



48 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

young men to study ''Theology with a view to 
the ministry." 

There was no theological institution in Kentucky 
at that day — 1828. Dr. Isaac Anderson had such 
a school at Maryville, Tenn. Upon consultation 
with friends, these five young men determined to 
go out to that infant institution. Accordingly, a 
close carriage was hired and they set out. As 
they approached the rough country towards the 
Cumberland River, they recognized a marked dif- 
ference in the outlook to their native bluegrass 
region, nor was the contrast less impressive as they 
climbed the mountains and crossed the narrow 
valley to Knoxville. Reaching that place, they 
stopped at the only tavern there, kept by Captain 
Jackson. Leaving the kind and hospitable enter- 
tainment of Captain Jackson's, the party proceed- 
ed to Maryville. The end of the journey being 
reached, the contrast and discontent attained their 
climax. The material aspect was repugnant to 
their tastes and habits (sanctified hearts would 
have taken a spiritual view of things and recog- 
nized in that rude school of the prophets the em- 
bryo of a mighty spiritual power). These ver- 
dant products of the revival had not crossed the 
''Red Sea" in their escape from Egypt, and longed 
to return. Upon consultation, it was resolved to 
return in the carriage that brought them out. 
Returning they crossed the Cumberland Mountains, 
at the foot of which they met two clergymen from 
T*ennessee, who prevailed upon the party to remain 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 49 

at the foot of the mountain that night, which was 
spent mainly in argument and persuasion to induce 
the young men to return to Maryville. Two of 
them were persuaded and agreed to return. The 
young lawyer was willing to return upon condition 
that if he did not like the place upon trial he 
should spend the winter with one of the clergy- 
men. The young men separated, two going to 
Lexington and three returning to Maryville. The 
after-life of the young men who refused to return 
is not known. Two of those returned remained 
at Maryville and became ministers of the gospel. 
The young lawyer remained a few weeks. 

Rev. Eli N. Sawtelle, who had been educated 
at Maryville, returned from a Northern tour, and 
desiring to get a location where he could be use- 
ful, was advised by the young lawyer to go to 
Kentucky. In the meantime, he must fulfill an 
appointment to preach at Abingdon, Va., and 
finding the young man dissatisfied, proposed that 
he should accompany him to Abingdon. This 
invitation was gladly accepted ; and buying a horse, 
the young lawyer left Maryville and spent the 
winter in upper East Tennessee, at the luxurious 
home of the Rev. F. A. Ross, where he continued 
to read theological books but made no great prog- 
ress towards the ministry. Here he remained 
until May, 1829, in which month he married the 
daughter of a Baltimorean. 
5 



50 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



\ 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Thus practically ended the young man's pursuit 
of the Christian ministry. This was the natural 
result of an obscure and unsatisfactory religious 
experience; an unsettled and wavering mind; a 
weak faith, if faith at all. He had not learned the 
profound wisdom of St. James' counsel: ''If 
any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that 
giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not; and 
it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, 
nothing wavering; for he that wavereth is like a 
wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. 
For let not that man think he shall receive any- 
thing of the Lord. A double minded man is 
unstable in all his ways." If the young man was 
a Christian at all, it is reasonably certain that this 
sudden turn toward the ministry was premature, 
and the scheme of education at Maryville ill ad- 
vised. His friends thought a separation from the 
scenes of his past short life (not yet twenty-one) 
was important to his spiritual development. This 
was a grave error. It was to send a boy in years 
(''who had joined the church under his father's 
eye and before his old associates ") away from those 
influences of home and friends most needful to 
kim in his inexperience to new scenes^ new as- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 5 1 

sociates and new influences, without any well- 
defined information of them. However valuable 
change of air, water, ''scenes" and society may be 
to the invalid, it is not so as to moral and spiritual 
culture, growth and health. Home is the nursery 
of piety; parents should keep their children as 
nearly under their Christian example and influence 
after as before maturity. Many young men have 
been ruined, doubtless, by the desire of parents 
for their temporal prosperity, by consenting that 
they should leave home for the city or the Wild 
West in search of worldly success. Better live 
in poverty and virtue, waiting for future reward, 
than in wealth and wickedness. Such riches soon 
perish, but the wickedness remains, hugging the 
soul like the iron chain around the body of the 
remorseful King of Scotland, pressing upon his 
heart the memory of his deed of blood. The 
Savior said, ''No man, having put his hand to the 
plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of 
God." This was uttered in answer to the man 
who said, "Lord, I will follow thee, but let me 
first go bid them farewell which are at my home." 
A distinguished commentator upon this passage 
says, "Such a person has not his mind properly 
directed toward the Heavenly inheritance, and is 
not fit to show the way to others." But is it to be, 
therefore, concluded that such a one has no faith, 
no grace? The spiritual birth implies infancy in 
spiritual things and, therefore, a growth unto the 
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. A 



52 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

child just learned to lisp the name of the parent 
would not be a good teacher of language. Neither 
is spiritual childhood fitted to instruct in those 
high and holy mysteries which strained the mind 
of an "Edwards" and set ablaze the tongue of a 
" Whitefield, " and into which the angels desire to 
look. 

The case of this young man should be a solemn 
admonition to every one who may think of enter- 
ing the gospel ministry. St. Paul says, ' ' How 
shall they preach except they be sent?" Govern- 
ments do not send ministers plenipotentiaries to 
foreign courts without qualifications to do the 
work intrusted to them. Neither is it to be 
supposed the King of kings sends embassadors 
to his revolted subjects without special adaptation 
to their mission. St. Paul writes to Timothy, "A 
bishop (that is, a preacher) must be blameless, (if 
married), the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, 
of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to 
teach, not given to wine, not greedy of filthy lucre ; 
but patient, not a brawler, not covetous, one 
that ruleth well his own house, having his children 
in subjection with all gravity," "not a novice." 
He must have a good report of them that are 
without. These qualities represent a very high 
degree of sanctification. And though the apostle 
probably did not intend the preacher should have 
them all in perfection before he could preach, yet 
his life as a Christian minister must conform to 
.this model. How solemn and heart-searching must 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 53 

be the inquiry, **Am I called to preach the gospel?" 
Lest while I preach to others I may be a **cast- 
away, " and at last hear the startling word, ''De- 
part! I never knew you." 



54 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER IX. 

It has been said the three most important 
incidents of man's Hfe are: ** Birth, because of its 
circumstantial influences on his earHest thought 
and conduct;" * 'Marriage, which involves the great- 
est responsibilities and incurs the most fearful 
risks ;" * * Death, which closes mortal life and leaves 
the soul only the garniture it has acquired while 
in the body. " "A jeweled spirit " to dwell amongst 
the stars or fettered for the prison whose bolts and 
bars are never drawn. Marriage was a divine 
institution between the unfallen parents of the 
race. Since the fall, which created the necessity 
for civil government, it is regarded as a civil con- 
tract under the law. Yet its sacred character is 
recognized not only by the manner of its con- 
summation, but by the enlightened conscience of 
the world. It was a humane provision not only 
for the multiplicat'ion of the species, but for in- 
dividual happiness. But happiness is not always 
the result of marriage. It is only means to an 
end. And there must be adaptation of the means 
to this end, as in all other cases. Upon this 
subject the fancies of the young and inexperienced 
are not surprising. The notions of fathers and 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 55 

mothers are quite as jejune, though of a different 
cast. Emotions excited by the perception of 
some supposed quahty or condition of the object 
may produce desire to possess. And possession 
attained, the charm may vanish. Ambitious fathers 
and scheming mothers traffic in their own flesh 
and blood for the world's applause or civility. 
These respectively sow the seed of divorce, which 
slackens the matrimonial tie in the community, 
'/fosters Hcentiousness and culminates in polyg- 
amy. " Mormonism is the harvest the nation is now 
reaping from this fruitful seed, and the end is not 
yet. So long as the causes exist the evil will con- 
tinue in some form. The difference between the mar- 
riages of the divorced, generally, and Mormonistic 
usage is the first conforms to civil law, the other 
has grown above it. An institution, so beneficent 
in its design and practical benefits, thus abused 
and abased, demonstrates the utter depravity of 
human nature, and the perversion of the best 
gifts of Providence to the base passions of men. 
National calamities may easily be traced to the 
violation of moral law. The licentious love of 
money and the desecration of the marriage vow 
are neither temporary or local, but national and 
continuous. Much was hoped for from the late 
deceased ** President Garfield." If his death, by 
the hands of a lunatic, should be regarded as 
''providential," it may be fairly inferred the 
nation is under the displeasure of the Rider in the 
affairs of men, who would not interpose to preserve 



56 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the life upon which so much seemed to depend. 
It is often said marriages are made in heaven. In 
the sense of a special providence over individual 
life this is true, but the free agency of the parties 
to the transaction is an element not to be over- 
looked. Second causes are under the control of 
infinite wisdom, and are adjusted to the ultimate 
purposes to be accomplished. One vessel is made 
to honor, another to dishonor. One marriage 
is happy, another is miserable. And both in 
harmony with the divine purpose in the develop- 
ment of the great principles of good and evil, 
to be fully displayed in the future world. 

There is no uniformity in the world's opinion 
as to the ages of males and females, to qualify 
them for conjugal life. The law prescribes the 
limitation of paternal authority and filial submis- 
sion in civilized societies. It may be that the 
•education of the young of both sexes has a general 
bearing on the capabilities to be acquired, and ex- 
ercised in after-life in this interesting relation. But 
it must be true that few parents understand (or if 
tJhey understand do not use their knowledge in) 
training their children for married life, either in 
accordance with common sense, the dictates of an 
intelligent affection, or the plain teachings of the 
Holy Word. The father who chases the dollar 
through every lane of life, trains his boy to the 
same pursuit, if possible, upon the idea that 
money buys happiness. In the diversified pur- 
suits and employments of men, the principle upon 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 5/ 

which that father acts is acted upon. Men seek 
for their sons wealth, fame and power. Women 
for their daughters ornaments, admiration, ease 
and pleasure. The attainments are external ; they 
relate to the world, and are limited to the world's 
capacity and disposition to appreciate them. And 
this is the shallow conception which the masses of 
men and women have of happiness. Educated 
upon such ideas, what qualifications have their 
children for the sacred duties of wedded life, or 
those hallowed pleasures which, like a spring run- 
ning through many branches, keep fresh and green 
the joys of domestic life. There the pulses of the 
mind and heart of all beat in harmony with one 
aim, the happiness of each; and one hope, the 
salvation of all. 

Every parent knows the near approach to 
certainty that the child will, at some stage of its 
hfe, marry ; the duties and responsiblities of this 
relation should be carefully taught so soon as the 
child is capable of comprehending them. If this 
be done faithfully, the child will early learn caution 
in entering into that state. Hasty and incongru- 
ous connections will not be common. The principles 
of the parties will be investigated, habits learned, 
tempers tested, ages ascertained, worldly circum- 
stances and connections will be considered, family 
traits of person and character understood, health 
of body and mind, essential elements of human 
happiness and homogeneity of spiritual life is in- 
dispensable. Who ever knew a happy home where 



58 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the wife sought to serve God and her husband to 
please himself and the world? Similarity in 
education and social positions are very important 
to married life. Many cases might be specified in 
which an inequality in these respects has wrought 
manifold mischief. In short, parents should teach 
their children that no young man or maiden is a 
fit companion for life whose principles, habits, 
temper, education and social position do not furnish 
a reasonable assurance that the marriage vow will 
be sacredly kept, and all its duties performed. By 
a fiction of civil law, husbands and wives are re- 
garded, in many respects, as one; but their duties 
and responsibilities are much diversified, and the 
education should be such that the young man may 
understand himself to be the head of his family, 
and the young woman, '* that submission to her 
husband in all things lawful is her duty." That 
the husband rule in love, and the wife submit with 
reverence and affection. The family is the base 
of all government, and as happiness is the object 
sought, the Creator has wisely ordered this 
primitive commonwealth to depend upon the 
faithful discharge of duty, by each member in 
their several spheres for the attainment of that end. 
Unhappy marriages are usually the result of 
parental neglect in the proper education and dis- 
cipline of children in view of this relation. Without 
this preparation young people should not marry. 
The marriage of the young lawyer took place 
before he was twenty-one years of age. And from 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 59 

the account already given of his ''nonage," his 
preparation for this new responsibihty was not, by 
any means, complete. The Baltimorean was 
wealthy, the lawyer's wife a modest girl, so delicate 
as to weigh less than one hundred pounds, edu- 
cated by her mother, "a noble woman" (the pupil 
of Mrs. Isabella Graham), with a vested property 
of ;^io.ooo, and a prospect of an indefinite addition 
from her grandfather's estate, then unsettled. With 
nothing of his own except the license to practice 
upon his slender stock of law knowledge. If inquiry 
had been made, as to the motives of this alliance, it 
would have been difficult to give an intelligent or 
truthful answer. It is, perhaps, true of him as 
of many others, that his motives were very much 
mixed so as not to be fully understood by himself. 
Whatever they were, the fact gave color and 
course to his after life. If he had profited by the 
experience and observation of twenty years he 
would have had a solemn counsel of two, himself 
and young wife, and would have landscaped their 
present possessions and mapped out their future 
course of life. But with plenty in hand and more 
in expectation of this world's wealth, they, with 
all the junior members of the family of this rich 
man, planned not how to save their fortune, but 
to waste it. It is not meant that there was any 
desire or design to waste; but without practical 
knowledge of the world and its ways of business, 
ignorant of the only elements of success, common 
sense, industry, energy and frugality, their plans 



60 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

were neither squared nor circled, their enterprise 
neither practical nor profitable. So that waste was 
the necessary result. With sixty slaves to wait 
on them and work on their thousands of acres of 
land, they ought to have grown rich, but they 
grew poorer. How many Southern families have 
a like history? Was slavery at the bottom of it 
all ? Not all. Slavery was an important factor in the 
sum, but ''money, money" was the rock that 
wrecked their fortunes. Too much money, in the 
hands of the young, is worse than too little. Give 
a young man a sum of money which, in his inex- 
perience he imagines will last always, and every 
valuable energy of body and mind will be paralyzed, 
and he will probably drift down the current of life 
into a drunkard's or pauper's grave. Many of those 
young men who were cotemporaries of the young 
lawyer's, starting out with brilliant prospects and 
ample means, have been hurried into personal and 
social ruin by the very advantages they possessed. 
While others, obscure, poor and unpatronized, 
have struggled with want and weariness to ample 
fortune and national fame. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 6 1 



CHAPTER X. 

The young couple spent the summer, and part of 
the fall of 1829 in Kentucky, visiting the young 
lawyer's relatives, and returned to Tennessee in the 
fall. The Baltimorean was engaged in the manu- 
facture of rope and bagging for the cotton country. 
Hemp was always in demand at his manufactory. 
The Kentucky son-in-law had grown up in a hemp 
country and was supposed to know something of 
its culture; an experiment was determined upon. 
Accordingly, in 1830, the young man caused some 
bottom land to be prepared and sowed in hemp. 
The crop had the appearance of a forest with all 
the small trees and bushes taken out, and then the 
hemp grower discovered he had sown hemp on a 
sand bank. In 1831 the kind father-in-law said to 
him, ''There is that creek bottom, of sixty acres; 
clear it and you shall have it." The young lawyer 
took off his coat and, ax in hand, fell to whacking 
on a tree about three feet in diameter, and wore 
himself out, as a wood-chopper, on that tree with- 
out getting it down. Finding that he could not 
clear that sixty acres by his personal powers, he 
set other hands to it, but the process was too slow 
for his fast ideas and he gave it up. In 1832 he 



62 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

returned to Kentucky, intending to buy a farm 
near Lexington. A little time before a bloody 
tragedy had been enacted near that place. Ex- 
cited political conflicts had engendered bitter 
personal feuds. 

Hon. Robert Wickliff, Senator from the County 
of Fayette (brother of Hon. Charles A. Wickliff), 
before mentioned, was the subject of a violent 
attack through the columns of the Kentucky 
Gazette, perhaps the oldest paper in Kentucky at 
that time, edited by Benning. Upon the appear- 
ance of this article, Charles, son of Robert Wick- 
liff, called upon the editor for the name of the 
author. Benning refused to give the name, and 
Charles Wickliff then denounced the editor as 
responsible in severe terms. The editor raised his 
rattan to strike, when Wickliff fired his pistol, kill- 
ing Benning. Great excitement followed. A 
nephew of the young lawyer's first legal preceptor, 
and his step-brother, immediately bought out the 
Gazette, and became its editor. In the first issue 
of the paper, after the purchase, the death of 
Benning was commented upon in terms so harsh 
and defiant, reiterating all that had been said in the 
former article, that young Charles Wickliff was 
constrained by the code to challenge the new 
editor. The editor had choice of weapon and 
distance, being the challenged party. He was very 
near-sighted, and upon the acceptance of the 
challenge chose pistols and the distance eight feet. 
The parties met on the line of Fayette Scott; the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 63 

distance measured, each in his place, at the words, 
one, two, three, fire ! the triggers were pulled, the 
editor's ball striking Wi-ckliff in the leg while 
Wickliff's pistol missed fire. Enraged by his 
wound Wichliff demanded a second fire. It was 
granted. Preparations carefully made, the parties 
took their position; at the word *'fire" the editor's 
ball struck Wickliff in the body, which caused him 
to raise his weapon too high, and the ball passed 
over the editor's head. Wickliff, in great agony, 
died on the grounds. This was a sad affair, and 
the friends of both parties were grieved. The 
young men had been pupils together in Transyl- 
vania University. There was some vaporing by one 
or two sons of distinguished fathers. And to 
show how nearly the lines of the tragic and comic 
approach each other ; one of these sons sent some 
sort of call' upon the editor, to which he replied, 
promising the use of a cowhide on the first suit- 
able occasion. The chivalrous son was reported 
to have hurried to his mother, stating he had killed 
the editor and wanted two hundred dollars to get 
beyond the reach of the law. It was said that the 
pother hastily handed the son the money, who 
coolly went to the saloon and disbursed the same 
as fast as it could be absorbed in that much pat- 
ronized institution. When the young lawyer 
reached Lexington he found things quiet. Eight 
feet and a shot that snuffed the candle at that 
distance was too gingerly for most stomachs. 

In the language of the parody upon the speech 



64 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

of one of Homer's heroes: **I still will keep the 
way I am in, and slumber in a whole calf skin." 

But was this successful, duelist happy? No! 
no ! The blood of a school-mate was on his 
skirts, though unscathed by law and untouched by 
human hand. The wail of the dying Wickliff 
could not be hushed. The blood stain would not 
be wiped out, even by the deepest plunge into the 
abyss of drunkenness. His reason reeled, stag- 
gered and fell ; then to the insane asylum, and 
then to the grave. 

And the immortal spirit, where is it? Is it a 
mere dream that there is a vast penitentiary of the 
universe, prepared by infinite benevolence for the 
confinement and separate habitation of such as are 
unfit to dwell in heaven or earth ? 

Reader, are you willing to enter such a place, to 
keep such company for a day, for a thousand 
years, forever? Does the company of Graves, the 
murderer of Cilley, or Burr, the murderer of Hamil- 
ton, and the long lists of bloody-handed duelists 
who have been thrust into that vast receptacle of 
vain regrets and useless repentance, lessen or ag- 
gravate his woe? Misery loves company in this 
world because human hopes are not all ex- 
tinguished. Dives begged Abraham to send a 
messenger to his five brothers whom he had left on 
earth, to warn them lest they should come into 
that place of torment. Was this prayer prompted 
by kindly affection toward his brothers, or the 
selfish fear that their company would aggravate his 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 65 

own sufferings? Man is a social being so long as 
motives to association exist, but the lost soul has 
a blank eternity before it, and may sit in its soli- 
tude, feeding its aimless life on memories of the 
past which yield no joy, or, with passions inflamed 
to frenzy, may rush through the dark ,caverns of 
that world of woe, seeking but not finding the 
phantom of its fury. Hell is no place for tears, 
but direful hate, rage against God and his uni- 
verse because unfitted for any place in it but hell. 
It was the duelist standing, in the shadow, over his 
own grave. 

His sable shroud around him bound, 

His bloody hand, uplifted high, 
And on his breast a large red wound 

That fixed the glare of his ghastly eye. 

Upon reaching Lexington, it was proposed to 
the young lawyer to sell to him the Gazette. He 
agreed to edit the paper temporarily as an experi- 
ment, and accordingly took charge of it. Things 
went smoothly for a time, until pecuniary consider- 
ations intervened to induce him to withdraw. 
Having determined to return to the ''Melee" of 
that institution, commonly ycleped "Court of 
Justice" (save the mark), arrangements were 
matured to that end when the dreadful scourge of 
Asiatic cholera broke out, spreading over Lexing- 
ton and the adjacent localities, producing universal 
consternation. When five hundred cases were 
down at one time in that small city, the young 
lawyer and wife and two infant children hastened 
6 



\ 



66 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

out of the infected region, and did not look behind 
until the homestead of his father-in-law was safely 
reached. His father, the pastor, and his brother, 
two years younger than himself, then preparing for 
the Christian ministry, were in the midst of the 
dying and dead, laboring for the relief of the sick 
and consolation of the dying ; and were providen- 
tially protected from the fearful f)estilence to its 
almost total disappearance. Worn down with 
watching and waiting, this dearly beloved brother, 
the companion of his boyhood, took a mild form 
of the epidemic which developed into typhus fever, 
and before his cowardly brother could reach him 
he was dead. 

How wonderful are the ways of Providence ! this 
noble type of manhood, tall and symmetrical in 
stature, and in face, carriage and manners the 
peer of many and admired of all, lovely in his 
Christian fortitude and consistent in piety, cut 
down in the bloom of life and promise, while his 
elder brother, wayward, unsteady, vain and 
worldly, was spared. 

Are the ways of Providence unequal ? No ! It 
was mercy to both brothers. The one taken from 
the evil to come to a higher, holier, happier sphere 
of usefulness; the other to drink many cups of 
bitter sorrow, that his proud and obdurate spirit 
might be broken upon the wheel of that Provi- 
dence which teaches wisdom by disappointing 
worldly ambition, loss of dearly loved ones, an- 
tagonism of equals, envy of inferiors, tyranny of 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 6^ 

superiors, treachery of friends and malice of enemies. 
The world's forces ordered and overruled by- 
omniscience and omnipotence, to fulfill his purposes 
of mercy by that discipline, which compels the 
mind to contrast sin and suffering- as its penalty on 
the one hand, and holiness and peace as its reward 
on the other. But, though this contrast must be 
seen by all men of ordinary understanding and 
reflection, it will not permanently affect the heart, 
but by divine influence. Therefore, sorrow and 
affliction, as penalties of evil conduct, do not al- 
ways produce reformation in the external, much 
less in the hidden, life. 

It may be truthfully said that the afflictions of 
many have the effect to harden rather than soften 
the heart. The scriptural accounts of Pharaoh, 
King of Egypt, his sufferings and fate, illustrate 
this truth and furnish an unanswerable argument 
in support of the doctrine, "That the Holy Spirit 
moves efficiently upon some and not upon others." 
If a wicked man's life is spared and his afflictions 
cause him to repent and turn from his wickedness, 
and he perseveres and seeks deliverance and pardon 
through the great deliverer, Jesus Christ, we may 
be assured that God has afflicted him in mercy. 
On the other hand, if his afflictions do no more 
than frighten him, and no permanent change of mind 
or conduct be produced we may safely say, the Holy 
Spirit leaves him at the end of the trial punished, 
but not saved. Is there any injustice in this? No. 
Neither of these men had any right to the divine 



6S THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

favor. Regeneration was a gift in the one case, 
but not in the other. Has any creature a right to 
demand why? Suppose I have two sons. I choose 
to give one a thousand dollars and the other fifty. 
Who has the right to challenge my act ? I have a 
reason for it, but am I bound to tell even my own 
family that reason? The infinitely wise and Holy 
One giveth not account of his secret counsels, and 
frail and ignorant men had best not arraign him at 
the bar of stupidity. All suffering which does not 
produce repentance and reformation is in the nature 
of punishment, and may be esteemed the beginning 
of those sorrows which shall reach their climax in 
the eternal world of misery. But a temporal evil, 
in whatever form it may come, is a warning, by 
present experience, to shun never-ending pain. 
And as the Holy Spirit says to every one who 
hears the Gospel, * ' Ask and ye shall receive, seek 
and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened 
unto you," and does not say that A shall be saved 
and B lost, but ^'He that cometh unto me I will 
in no wise cast out," the lost have lost themselves 
by their own voluntary act, and none will be lost 
by any affirmative judgment beforehand, com- 
pulsory of the will. But is God unjust or unmerci- 
ful in dispensing special favor to some and not to 
others? Let us try this question by the common 
consent of mankind. Insurrections, rebellions and 
civil wars have marked their bloody tracks over the 
nations and continents in the past centuries. When 
such turbulent outbreaks have been suppressed, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 69 

how is justice and mercy dispensed to the rebell- 
ious? Before the law all are guilty. Are all 
punished ? Some are to vindicate the law and insure 
future obedience. The multitude is pardoned. 
Good governments do not enforce penalties 
merely that the suffering may terminate on the 
criminal, but with the benevolent design to pre- 
serve order, peace and submission to law for the 
good of the whole. Are the eternal principles of 
right and wrong stamped upon the universe with 
no sanction for their violation ? By common 
consenrmen may inflict punishment for the viola- 
tion of the human law. Shall the rightful Sovereign 
of all men be denied such right? Are his laws 
less worthy of obedience than those of man, his 
creature? Foolish and feeble men — many whose 
want of wisdom is shown in their claim of it — see 
an infinitesimal grain through a microscopic lens 
of that universe which embraces all worlds, and 
all space — shoreless, boundless, infinite — and yet 
dare to challenge the perfections of Him who is, 
has been and will be, from everlasting to everlast- 
ing, ''the same yesterday, to-day and forever." 



70 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XL 

The currents of human life are like the winding 
water courses, diverted by obstructions from their 
wonted channels, running sometimes east, thence to 
all the other points of the compass, but always 
following the law of gravitation to their natural 
level. Even well considered schemes of business 
or pleasure are often interrupted by unforeseen 
conditions which make the plan impracticable, but 
leave the main purpose unaltered. Such was the 
young lawyer's experience when two hundred 
miles from his contemplated location as a lawyer. 
He retained the purpose to practice law without 
any ch-^sen thea r for his enterprise. In his 
absence in Kentucky two of his brothers-in-law 
had undertaken to look up and utilize the much 
scattered interests of their grandfather's estate. 
One of them became tired of it and proposed to 
the young lawyer to take his place. Upon the 
surface this promised large profits, and as there 
were lands in several States, much travel would be 
necessary, and the settlement of conflicting claims 
to them would give him practical knowledge of 
land law, and familiarize him with that class of 
litigation material to be known by every lawyer. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. /I 

Unsettled as to his future, and always ready to 
yield to any flattering persuasions of pleasure or 
profit, contrary to the better judgment of his young 
wife, and taking no proper account of those ad- 
ventitious influences upon his habits and morals 
incidental to such an undertaking, he accepted the 
place. He would fain cover, with a vail, the folly 
of that act, because it was the door opened by the 
Devil into sins and sorrows which true wisdom 
would have foreseen, and common sense, much 
more the fear of God and the love of Christ, should 
have avoided. He had been married three years, 
and with a young wife and two infant children such 
an employment was utterly inconsistent with his 
duties and real interests. 

For the benefit of young men who may be 
placed in similar circumstances, it is well to look 
into the motives which prompted this foolish un- 
dertaking. These were various ; the ruling motives, 
however, were love of novelty, covetousness. New 
sights, scenes and associations fired the imagi- 
nation and gilded it with a prospect of a harvest 
of gold — a promise to the hope sadly broken to 
the sense. The old nursery tale of the bag of 
gold at the end of the rainbow is not much more 
absurd than the fancy which excited this hope. 
The estate had been in the hands of an executor 
for sixteen years. He was a lawyer, had been a 
judge and was then a member of Congress; like 
most other devisees and distributies, some of those 
of this estate complained that no settlement of his 



72 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

account had been made by the executor, and that 
he had neglected the business entrusted to him — 
to their heavy damage. Thus an other motive was 
presented to undertake this business — an imagined 
wrong of which there was no sufficient evidence. 
Starting out, hke Don Quixote, to right all wrongs 
in the premises, the young adventurer soon found 
himself in pursuit of the executor aforesaid, whom 
he did not overtake until he reached that most 
renowned city of the nation, ** Washington. " The 
most renowned, both for brains and the want of 
them, gathered there every year. The executor 
was a member of that congregation. (So august 
when seen through a telescope and so small on 
close inspection.) That congregation had entered 
with intense interest upon the consideration of 
the question ''whether the fabric of a poor man's 
shirt should be made at home or abroad, and the 
executor coming from a country where shirt fabrics 
were not a domestic industry, of course must in- 
sist that his people should get their shirts from 
abroad, and must lift up his voice in that behalf. The 
young " Knight-errant "called upon the executor at 
his lodgings on Pennsylvania Avenue, and informed 
the honorable member of his business, who inter- 
posed the present pressure of the "Great Ques- 
tion " under discussion, in which he was pr-eparing 
to take part, after which his business should have 
attention. After the lapse of a few days his 
right was recognized. In a full house and gallery, 
the member arose and said : ** Mr. Speaker," then 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 73 

Staggered and fell into the arms of the nearest 
member, and was dead. Suddenly the piercing 
cry of the widow was heard ringing above the 
stunned, awe-stricken crowds in the hall and gal- 
lery. The dead member was carried into an ante- 
chamber, and in great confusion and distress the 
House adjourned. The name of that member was 
Thomas T. Bouldin. How utterly contemptible 
did forensic conflict over such a question appear 
in the presence of death ; and how solemn the re- 
flection that the account of the executor had been 
so suddenly transferred beyond the jurisdiction of 
human tribunals to the great court of ''final ap- 
peals," where justice and mercy harmonize in 
every judgment. Thus the first act of the drama 
ended tragically and cut off every reasonable hope 
of winding up the business satisfactorily. The 
situation was embarrassing and made more so by 
the fact that the young lawyer's expenses, by the 
delay and otherwise, had so far reduced his ready 
cash as to require some supplement to take him 
home. An application to the Hon. Richard M. 
Johnson, the **Hero of Tippecanoe," the slayer 
of Tecumseh, furnished him with all he needed, 
and with much of the wind taken out of the sails 
of his imagination, he returned from whence he 
came. What now was to be done ? A suit against 
the administrator of the executor was not to be 
thought of in the utter ignorance of those inter- 
ested in the condition of the estate. There was, 
however, another executor, who had not qualified 
7 



74 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

as such ; he took the matter in hand, and being 
a devisee, he made a sweeping settlement, the 
precise terms of which are not certainly known, 
and forced the young lawyer and his brother-in- 
law to accept certain interests, supposed to be 
in widely scattered lands, all, or nearly so, in dis- 
pute, covered by other grants, tax suits and other- 
wise. Thus the two young men must withdraw 
from the business or follow a ''Jack in the lantern" 
over an area of a thousand miles. Forbearance 
forbids comment. The young lawyer should have 
seen the hand of Divine Providence in the un- 
looked for death of Judge Bouldin, and the un- 
controllable action of the second executor plainly 
admonishing him that he was not in the line of 
his duty ; but he had purchased an interest in the 
estate at his i^rst engagement, for which his cash 
note was outstanding, and not seeing clearly his 
remedy, *'and in hope of realizing something from 
the scattered lands," and having no other refuge 
(than absolute inactivity or a return to an attempt 
at professional life) and his brother-in-law having 
his all at stake upon the issue, he determined to 
follow up the phantasmagoria to the end, which 
was not reached until five years of his most valua- 
ble time had been consumed in expensive travel 
fruitless searches for land titles in offices where 
they were in some instances, but were fraudulently 
concealed. Unprofitable compromises, because 
of the locality of the properties and expensive suits 
within which time two of his children had died in 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 75 

his absence, giving more direct and solemn warning 
of his evil course, until with means wasted, heavy- 
heart, in disgust with himself, and the detestable 
business he had so long followed, he returned from 
his last search to repent of the past and try to re- 
gain some self-respect and some honest business. 
But there are some compensations in undertakings 
which do not result in the accomplishment of the 
initial purpose. Those five years of wandering 
life had taught the young man several lessons. He 
discovered his own mind needed careful training to 
give it unity, persistence of effort; and that his 
heart needed to be put into a straight jacket to keep 
it from self-murder ; that men are generally in- 
tensely selfish ; that public officers usually shape 
their conduct with reference to the guards around 
the subjects of their actions; that business is gen- 
erally isolated from the human effections, and not 
very familiar with common honesty ; that popular 
prejudice is as inexorable as false; that priestly 
robes do not always cover humble and holy hearts, 
though blood is said to be thicker than water, yet 
self-interest dilutes it often to the consistency of 
vapor ; that governments, called the most benefi- 
cent, are sometimes ''Juggernauts" to grind to 
powder the hopes and happiness of the individual, 
worthy or unworthy; and his whole experience con- 
firms the truth embodied in these lessons. In 
short, from his own experience and observation, 
he became thoroughly convinced of the total de- 
pravity of the race of man, and that true religion 



']6 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

finds no genial soil or favoring climate in the hearts 
of men. And here the infinite goodness of the 
*' Great God " may be brought home to the soul, 
in the view of the degeneracy of the race, and that 
Providence, which takes one-half of the human 
family out of this sin-cursed world before accounta- 
bility as moral agents, supervenes. 

The question propounded to our Lord by one 
who heard his wonderful words, **Are there few 
that be saved," was doubtless prompted by an 
intelligent apprehension of man's true character. 
The blessed Teacher did not give a categorical 
answer, • but in a tone of awful warning said, 
' * Strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many 
I say unto you shall seek to enter in and shall not 
be able." What proportion of earth's teeming 
millions, which have come in and gone out in six 
thousand years, and shall so come and go to the 
end of time, is represented by that illimitable 
word ''many?" If truthful history interprets that 
word in its true meaning, have not the masses of 
the world's adult population, to the present time, 
fallen under that fearful phrase, ''Shall not be 
savablef' In the same connection the Savior evi- 
dently referred to that class of persons who nomi- 
nally profess religion, but of whom he will say, 
"I never knew you." There is a phase of 
religious sentiment, prevalent at this day, which 
makes salvation so free that self-denial scarcely 
constitutes an element in practical life. Formu- 
lated it is the "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. ^'J 

we die and go to heaven." Does the mere re- 
mission of punishment restore the Divine image? 
Does the drunkard, the glutton and the debauchee 
reform because the penalty of his crime is not 
immediately enforced? An unconditional pardon 
is a bounty to crime ; a compromise between the 
Church and the world must result in the ruin of 
both, unless averted by divine interposition. The 
Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians, * ' By grace 
ye are saved through faith ; and that not of your- 
selves: it is the gift of God." Thus salvation 
is so full that no human merit enters into it, but 
the Scriptures teach that faith works by love, 
purifies the heart and overcomes the world. 
Salvation is the result of that grace of faith tliat 
apprehends the evil nature of sin, the justice of 
God in its punishment (in the individual), the mercy 
of God in the wonderful scheme of man's re- 
demption, in the life, death and resurrection of 
the Lord Jesus Christ; and reveals to the heart 
these great facts, so as to produce dread of God's 
justice on account of personal guilt which extorts 
the cry, ''What shall I do to be saved?" and 
accepts Christ's work instead of his own. And 
that grace is the fountain running through faith, 
which waters and makes fruitful the Christian 
life, cleansing the heart, * ' For with the heart man 
believeth unto righteousness." Thus the Christian 
becomes a new man spiritually, his character is 
changed, his reputation depends upon the character 
of the community in which he lives. 



yS THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XII. 

The young man's important business enterprise 
had thus proved a flat failure in its pecuniary results. 
The follies of his past life nearly approaching life's 
meridian with a growing family, without a home 
or any profitable employment. His mind wandered 
back to the thought of the Christian ministry, but 
he was not fit to be entrusted with such a sacred 
office. The law seemed to be his only refuge. In 
this state of mind he was invited to deliver a 
''Fourth of July'' oration in his neighborhood. 
Some of the leading men of the county were 
present, and at the close the speaker was ap- 
proached by them and told he must be a candi- 
date for the Legislature of the State. With very 
Httle acquaintance, and less homogeneity with the 
manners and habits of the people, and in the face 
of strong local prejudices, he was flattered into the 
acceptance of the candidacy, against a farmer and 
justice of the peace who had a very large family 
connection, and of the same political party. The 
July orator was beaten one hundred and three 
votes, as he ought to have been for his folly in 
making such a race, and because he was brought 
out to aid the election of the Congressman and 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 'jg 

floater of his party, who were hard pressed in 
debate, but were elected. Here was another flat 
failure. Gathering some rudimental law books he 
betook himself to the study of Blackstone, Buller, 
Espinasse, etc. He had not practiced law in 
Tennessee ; it was thought needful that he should 
be regularly licensed. He had been licensed in 
Kentucky and Virginia. Accordingly, he applied 
to the Hon. Samuel Powel who, after some con- 
versation, advised him to read more before licensure. 
This was kindly done and very proper. The bar 
was an able one, and something more than clap- 
trap was necessary to success. In due time he was 
licensed, and within the year had a large share of 
the practice in his county. At the next canvass for 
the Legislature, the party convention which had 
been gotten up to nominate the squire nominated 
the lawyer he had beaten in the former race, but 
the lawyer declined the nomination. In this he 
acted politically foolish, for he doubtless could 
have been elected; and on the other hand it was 
providentially overruled, to cut him off from all 
future chances of following the vicious life of a 
politician. For though willing to run for the State 
Senate in after years, he could not get the party 
nomination. He continued to labor in his profes- 
sion as a lawyer, and his business soon extended 
into other counties ; but party spirit was rampant, 
and the hard cider campaign, of 1840, brought 
out champions on either side, big and little, to 
hurrah their resp'ective candidates into the presi- 



\ 



80 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

dency of the nation. Of course the lawyer had 
to do a Httle of this wind work, particularly because 
the Harrison elector had taken the wind out of his 
Van Buren competitor and help was needful. The 
lawyer's connection with parties had already ar- 
rayed the majority of the Whig leaders against him. 
The defeated candidate for Congress, an able lawyer 
and worthy man, became hostile to him, and 
Brownlow's Whig undertook to whip him into good 
manners, by making charges against him of small 
rascalities in his native State. These charges were 
ridiculously false, and no notice was taken of them. 
The lawyer had done many bad things in Kentucky, 
but these charges were made by some one who 
had probably heard some hard things said of this 
(fellow from Kentucky), and guessed at them as 
likely to hurt him, in which conceit he was mis- 
taken. If he had been well informed it might 
have been otherwise. But an incident occurred 
during the canvass of 1840 which did hurt the 
lawyer. 

Andrew Johnson and the lawyer were together 
at an appointment of one Spencer Jarnagan, a 
Whig champion. Jarnagan refused to divide time 
with the Democrats; thereupon the lawyer and 
some others arranged to have the old veteran in 
political rough-and-tumble, John Balch, Esq., to 
go upon the stand and demand a division of time 
in the discussion, which excited much sport amongst 
the Democrats, and was doubtless offensive to the 
Whig orator. In the meantime the lawyer had 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 8 1 

lost respect for and, perhaps, was guilty of some 
incivility to Mr. Jarnagan. Hard cider, doubtless, 
with mixture to give it body, had swelled the 
popular enthusiasm until, like "Noah's Ark, ""the 
flood had lifted the log cabin on its surging bosom 
and floated Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, into the 
presidential offices. But how soon did the shadow 
settle upon the glory of that triumph ! and how 
soon did the Whig party reap as it was sown ! For 
the success of the party these candidates were 
selected, holding diverse opinions upon some 
debatable questions. This fact and the manner 
of the canvass were rebuked, first, by the death 
of General Harrison, and secondly, by the total 
change of party relation by President Tyler, 
reaching in its results beyond the presidential 
election of 1844, in which Polk, Dallas, Texas, 
and 54, 40, swept the popular heart like a tor- 
nado. During the reign of President Tyler (the 
President is a king, and when a few more shall 
have been assassinated will be so-called) a vacancy 
occurred in the office of District Attorney, in one 
of the districts of Tennessee. During the recess 
of Congress, President Tyler gave this appoint- 
ment to the lawyer. In the meantime the said 
Spencer Jarnagan had been elected to the United 
States Senate ; at the meeting of that body, the 
President nominated the lawyer as Attorney, 
aforesaid. Parties in the Senate were very nearly 
balanced. When the nomination came up, some 
Senators were absent ; and Senator Jarnagan took 



82 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

occasion to inform that august body that the 
nominee was very obscure, had no reputation in 
the higher courts, and withal a Democrat. And 
though his colleague, Hon. E. H. Foster, voted 
to confirm, the majority of one defeated the nomi- 
nation. Thus Jarnagan had his revenge, and the 
lawyer, ''quondam" District Attorney, was rele- 
gated to private life. 

For several years afterw^ards the lawyer's ex- 
perience proved he had just enough reputation, 
poHtically, to keep him nearly in front, but never 
in the lead. His services were in demand to battle 
for glorious Democracy, but somebody else always 
wanted and got the offices. Some partial friends 
desired him to be a candidate for judge of the first 
Judicial Circuit in opposition to Hon. S. J. W. Lucky 
(now deceased) before the Legislature, but Hon. 
David T. Patterson stood in a peculiar relation to 
the Hon. Andrew Johnson, who manipulated the 
party. And one of the leaders wrote to the lawyer 
that Patterson had a cousin in the Legislature who 
was a Whig, and whose vote would probably elect 
Patterson, so closely were parties divided in that 
body. Democracy demanded the sacrifice and the 
lawyer submitted. Patterson was badly beaten. 
A legislative election soon came on. The lawyer, 
still a political projectile, was solicited to run, but 
a certain Dr. Martin had earnest solicitude to serve 
the District. It was agreed that a small number 
of the supposed friends of the parties should settle 
it; and the lawyer's friends (so-called) either 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 83 

thought the position of State Senator too low or 
too high for him. Accordingly he retired indefi- 
nitely. Two years afterwards it was thought ex- 
pedient to bring the lawyer to the front for the 
same position. Dr. Martin had subsided, but 
up sprang the embryo Cicero of East Tennessise, 
Langdon C. Haynes, who wanted the Senatorship 
as a stepping stone to a contest with the Hon. 
Andrew Johnson two years after for Congress. 
When the Whig party thought the two Democrats 
were fairly in the field, they brought out Major A. 
Tipton ; another sacrifice was demanded for the 
loved Democracy, and as the lawyer had some 
knowledge of the political salt sea, having been 
several times on its coast, and as Haynes had 
inadvertently let his pistol go off, the ball ac- 
cidentally going through Brownlow's breeches 
somewhere above the ankle, producing a little red- 
ness on the shin, and as Tennessee, the volunteer 
State, greatly admired and was ready to heroize 
any one who had the nerve to hold a pistol steady 
enough to shoot through a man's breeches below 
the knee, of course the lawyer must again retire 
to save the party. 

Reader, you doubtless think this lawyer was a 
very ambitious man ; if so, you mistake. It was a 
quality much below ambition. It was inordinate 
vanity and credulity, which, in the nature of the 
case, brought repeated disappointments. The de- 
sire for popular praise is wholly different from 
an aspiration after something good or great 



\ 



\ 



84 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

Vanity, which erects a pyramid of self-esteem 
upon its own oasis, accepts all flattery as the 
portrait of its own excellencies ; and herein lies 
the true secret of all real littleness. Daniel Webs- 
ter was not the idol of the masses ; intellectually 
grand, and morally noble, his eye scanned and his 
heart cherished the great principles upon which 
social, political and national happiness must be 
built: His philanthropy expanded as the canopy 
over the earth. He earnestly desired and hoped 
for the rational liberty of all races, and the eleva- 
tion of mankind to its normal dignity and glory. 
His range of thought was too high to catch the 
popular breath. The intellectual head of the 
Nation, he was the wisest statesman of his time, 
and if his forecast had been heeded, the social and 
political earthquake upon the question of slavery 
might have been prevented. His wisdom sug- 
gested that the United States should buy the 
slaves, and if this suggestion had been adopted, 
how much better it would have been for all sections 
of the Union. Southern slaveholders would have 
been compensated for their property (so-called) 
and the national debt would have probably been 
no greater than at the end of the war, and a mil- 
lion of fratricides been prevented. History alone 
can vindicate the wisdom or condemn the folly of 
public men and measures. Daniel Webster was 
not President of the United States, Andrew John- 
son was ; both are dead, and only live in history. 
Does not the name of Daniel Webster challenge 



' THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 8$ 

the profound respect of all intelligent minds? 
Contrasts are odious, but sometimes so patent that 
the eyes must be shut if not seen. It is not out 
of place to state that there is another character 
often developed in public men, differing from those 
mentioned. Such seek not the attainment of great 
and noble ends for the public weal, nor is mere 
popular praise the main object. Covetousness, 
the index of vile selfishness, is the controlling 
passion of such souls ; with consummate cunning 
and the hypocrisy or impudence of Diabolus him- 
self, they cozen or conquer the masses by flattery 
or fear, and once in place, the place is made to 
perpetuate possessions, and though the intelligent 
and virtuous mind despises such characters, it is 
yet sadly true the politics of the Nation are mainly 
in such hands. In free government, parties may 
be expected and may be useful when great national 
questions arise upon untried policies, but upon 
what principle of necessity or utility are parties to 
be kept alive if the government is in honest hands, 
and the people are prospering? Why, continue 
the party strife : plainly to feed the greed of hungry 
demagogues. In our complex form of govern- 
ment, hitherto untried in the history of nations, 
questions of novelty and interest were the neces- 
sary outgrowth of such an experiment, and Divine 
Providence, as he has always done in the great 
vicissitudes of human affairs, raised up instruments 
to grapple, mould and set in motion and direct 
the true principles upon which such questions 



86 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

should be adjusted. Every instrument to its 
special use : Washington, to lead armies to victory 
and to be the centre around which the national 
heart should gather ; Jefferson, to pen the * 'Great 
Charter of American Liberty;" Hancock, Adams, 
Franklin and their confreres, to rift the colonies 
from their mother country, and to formulate the 
Union of States ; Hamilton, to expound the prin- 
ciples of Federal Union on one hand, and Jeffer- 
son to assert the limitation of Federal power and 
the rights of the States on the other. From the 
distinctive views of the great political leaders 
sprang the first parties of the Nation, and the 
question then was: ''Are the United States a 
Nation of States or a Confederation of States?" 
This question has been the base of national con- 
tests upon internal policy from that first political 
issue. On the one side centralization was feared, 
on the other anarchy. Under various guises the 
conflict was kept up until it reached its climax in 
the rebellion of fifteen States claiming the right of 
secession from the so-called Confederacy of States, 
and the sword only could settle it. The verdict 
was: ''The States are a Nation." The question 
is settled. What remains for parties to fight over? 
The spoils of office, and the common people must 
furnish the capital while the demagogues do the 
trading. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 8/ 



CHAPTER XIII. 

While the lawyer was not successful in winning 
office from the ''dear people," he had all the suc- 
cess in his profession his qualifications justified. 
His political ventures had discovered to himself 
that ''homogeneity of nurture" — habits, tastes 
and manners with the masses — was needful to po- 
litical success, and in those several particulars he 
was sadly at fault. ' ' Black broadcloth and a gold 
watch were a good cause of challenge to a polit- 
ical aspirant in those palmy days of the Republic." 
And it would be difficult to prove upon the princi- 
ples of human nature that such a sentiment (prej- 
udice, if you choose) is in itself wrong. All animate 
nature in its diversified forms aggregate upon the 
like rule. "Birds of a feather flock together." 
And here let me suggest that a conscientious man, 
if thoughtful, will hesitate to become the repre- 
sentative of the people whose characteristics are 
not in harmony with his own, because it is scarcely 
possible for such a man to understand the mind of 
his people, much less the heart. The lawyer had, 
upon reflection, reason to be gratified, that he 
had been so often shelved politically, and sought 
political preferment before the people no more. 
A dark shadow was gathering over the lawyer's 



88 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

pathway. Politics and professional business had so 
engrossed his mind he had not made the improve- 
ment of his past experience as he should have 
done. The ''Angel of Death " was commissioned 
to use him from the moral slumber into which he 
had fallen by contact with the outside world. 
His eldest child, a daughter of fifteen years, 
approaching womanhood, lovely in form, but more 
lovely in ** spirit, the jewel in the family heart, 
her father's pride and hope, " fell a victim to pul- 
monary consumption. A weary, but patient suf- 
ferer of five long months, she bore the slow but 
constant work of the "Destroyer" without a mur- 
mur, yielding as it advanced, her mortal frame 
slowly sinking under its power, but her soul lu- 
minous with the light from heaven. The end 
came, a struggle of some hours, and then a calm 
for the final farewell. She said to parents, broth- 
ers, sisters, meet me in heaven. "Oh heaven! 
heaven ! " were her last words. Her eyes closed, 
and her spirit left the worn-out body, to be taken 
to one of the many mansions in her Heavenly 
Father's home. 

Two infant boys had been taken to that happy 
home. While the father was wildly chasing the 
ghost of that old "estate," both died within two 
months during their father's absence. There were 
now three children left. The triumphant Chris- 
tian death of the dear daughter had left the fath- 
er's heart in a state of mingled grief and joy. As 
a chastisement the discipline was not so fully- ap- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 89 

predated as it should have been. The loss of such 
a child to the parent, however beneficent to the 
child, should be regarded as punitive to the sinner 
and severely corrective to the Christian. God, who 
sees the depth of human depravity and the power 
of worldlymindedness, knows when and how to 
apply remedies according to the necessity of each 
case, and in this instance saw it necessary to 
double the affliction of the father by taking away 
his only remaining son, eleven years old, within 
two months after his sister's death. This was a 
crushing blow upon the father's heart. The shock 
benumbed his sensibilities nearly to the hardness 
of stone-like stoicism, feeling so intensified as to 
almost be unconscious of its existence. But such 
hardness could not continue long. The strain re- 
laxed, the rock broke, and the bitter waters of 
human sorrow swelled and overflowed. 

Bereaved of his four eldest children, leaving a 
paralytic wife and two infant daughters, and the co- 
incidence of the decease of the two first within two 
months in the absence of the father, who seemed 
to be running a race in search of a phantom, and 
the death of the two last also within two months, 
while the father was wrangling in courts, or riding 
over the counties, hunting up some one to say he 
was qualified for great things, when, in fact, his 
life was empty and vain, were parts of his experi- 
ence which could not fail to impress his head and 
heart ; nor has the lapse of more than thirty years 
effaced the impression of those marked and sad 



90 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

visitations of Providence to arrest the soul tending 
to destruction. These four httle graves, lying side 
by side, say to the father, ** Remember," and the 
shadow of a great sorrow passes over his soul, and 
he turns to God and pleads for pardon for Christ's 
sake. 

How wonderful is the constitution of the human 
mind, and how beneficently has the Creator ar- 
ranged its different departments, so that the press, 
ure upon one may be relieved by the action of 
another. If this were not so, the world's woes 
would craze the race. The world is on the bottom 
step of the soul's capacities and susceptibilities; 
the topmost round of its knowledge, joys and sor- 
rows will never be reached. The soul of man is 
Hke a reservoir filled from the unfailing spring of 
living water and emptied upon the fields of the 
Lord's husbandry, or like volcanic fires pent up 
until they burst out in lurid flame in the eternal 
darkness. 

These terrible breaches into his home left their 
shadow to linger on his heartstone, and to darken 
his pathway, until time wore off the sharp edges of 
his grief. The Holy Spirit had lifted the cloud a 
little, that the father could see dimly the hand 
which inflicted the ''chastisement." He then 
thought on his way, and sought to turn his feet to 
the divine testimonies, and desired to keep the 
Lord's commandments. He could truly say, " I 
know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and 
that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me." And 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 9 1 

then the father could see a gleam of sunlight 
throught the rifted clouds, when he remembered 
his dear boy's words, ** Father, Jesus Christ knows 
whether I shall get well." 

Four children in heaven ! What a blessed relief 
to the pain of separation ! What a blessed hope 
of clasping them to the heart in the home where 
death makes no separation ! And there is verified 
to the believer's soul that every cloud, however 
dark, has a silver lining. 

But though man is made to mourn he is made to 
work also. ' *In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat 
bread" is the inexorable condition of the race. 
Political aspirations discarded, professional busi- 
ness must be attended to. Subdued and chastened, 
the lawyer ceased the habit of traveling on the 
Sabbath day to courts, and found no loss of busi- 
ness from it. Engaged by a client to attend upon 
the hearing of a Chancery case, at Fayettevillle, 
Lincoln County, Tenn., the client and solicitor 
went by steam down the Tennessee River to 
Whitesburg in Alabama, and thence by Huntsville 
to Fayetteville. Arrived at their destination and 
lodging, in an office contiguous to their hotel, 
awoke about four o'clock in the morning the 
court should open. The darkness was impenetra- 
ble. Suddenly an electric blaze made the night 
luminous in a moment. Then a heavy fall, as of 
large stones on the roof, and quick as thought the 
fearful roar of the mighty tornado. The lawyer 
sprang from his bed as the door flew open, and the 



g2 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

mighty, rushing, thundering, tearing, crashing 
tempest swept with resistless force through the 
town, crushing churches, houses, dweUings, stores, 
and whirHng the heavy materials of such struct- 
ures (even to the bricks from the walls) from 
their places, and leaving no trace of them on or 
near the ground on which they stood. 

The lawyer had no more than reached the floor 
from his bed, when the window next to the street 
was shattered and driven in, followed by laths, 
plaster, glass and other fragments, and a furious 
flood of rain, which drenched his nearly denuded 
body. The noise and confusion can not be bet- 
ter described than that it vivified the idea of the 
wreck of matter and crush of worlds. Refuge there 
was none. A minute or more and the storm king 
passed, flying higher on its lifted wings, his 
wrath a little abated. 

Feeling thus (for seeing in the thick darkness 
was impossible), the lawyer moved toward the open 
door, and finding it attempted to shut it, but the 
wind was still too strong. His need of help re- 
minded him of his client, who had occupied 
another bed. He called his name. No answer ; 
again, no answer. ''What, is he killed?" He 
shouted aloud his name. And a voice as though 
at a great distance, was faintly heard, ''Here." 
" Where are you ? " His reply, " Under the bed." 
*'Come out and help shut the door." He 
crawled out, and with his help the door was 
closed. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 93 

At the dawn of day the piteous cry was heard, 
**0h help! help!" and the lawyer and client 
went forth. They found five persons had been 
killed, and about sixty others wounded. It was 
said about one hundred buildings of various kinds 
had been destroyed or greatly damaged. Many 
incidents of much interest occurred, showing the 
directing hand of Providence. Destruction was 
all around the lodging of the lawyer and client. 
The wall of an adjoining room was blown down. 
A large hotel stable close by was carried off, not 
leaving a sill or other vestige of the material. 
The end of the hotel was blown in, and not a 
hair of their heads was lost. 

Cyclones of late years have become quite com- 
mon. - Let every one remember that as surely as 
the Lord was in the cloud that led the children 
of Israel out of Egypt through the wilderness, 
and in the storm-capped Sinai, in the midst of its 
thunderings and quaking, so *' He is in every 
cloud that blackens the sky, and every wind that 
rocks and rends the forest;" and to his people 
says : ** Be not afraid ; it is I." 



94 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

The lawyer had maintained his membership in 
church, and was a regular attendant on the ser- 
vices of the sanctuary, and uniformly maintained 
and ever continued the duty of family worship, 
morning and evening. When about forty-five 
years old he was elected and installed an elder 
in the church. 

These visitations of Divine Providence, already 
stated, the death of four of six children, and the 
last imminent peril in which he was personally 
exposed, were calculated to impress his mind 
with a keen sense of his own unfaithfulness to 
the ''Master whom he professed to serve." If 
the divine purpose had been to inflict vindictive 
punishment or death upon him, how could he 
have escaped in the intense darkness in the midst 
of flying missiles and falling walls ? 

As it has been before intimated, there is a dif- 
ference between that wrath let loose in this world 
on the hardened sinner, and is only a foretaste of 
that which is to come, and that chastisement 
administered to awaken in the renewed soul the 
almost dormant spirit of true love and service. 
If salvation depended alone upon man's faith- 
fulness, who could rationally hope to be saved ? 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 95 

But the lawyer, as the sequel proved, had many 
more years to live and much more to learn and to 
suffer. His vanity in seeking political preferment 
had been so often rebuked, and so many of his 
schemes had ended in disappointment, he began 
to realize the unsatisfactory nature of all mere 
worldly pleasures, pursuits or profits. He pur- 
sued his profession with a view to supply the 
wants of his family rather than a desire for 
notoriety. But he was a man and a citizen, and 
was not indifferent to current events, as they af- 
fected the moral, social and political interest of 
the country. 

The mode of electing Judges of the courts of 
Tennessee was changed by an amendment of the 
State Constitution, and in 1834 election forjudges 
was to be made by the people for the first time in 
the several circuits and districts. Hon. Seth J. W. 
Lucky was then Judge of the First Judicial Cir- 
cuit. Hon. Thomas L. Williams was then, and 
had been for many years. Chancellor of the First 
District. Both these eminent men are far beyond 
the reach of blame or praise, but it is due to each 
to say, ''that no more incorruptible, fair and 
worthy men ever held a judicial office in Ten- 
nessee." Unfortunately they both became candi- 
dates for the Chancellorship of the First District, 
and soon after two others, Hon. Samuel Rodgers 
and Hon. J. B. Heiskel. All these gentlemen be- 
longed to the same political party — they were all 
Whigs. Hon. D. T. Patterson, who had been de- 



96 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

feated by Judge Lucky for the Circuit Judgeship, 
desired to succeed him in that position ; but some 
of the lawyer's friends claimed the place for him. 
To smooth the troubled waters, a letter from head- 
quarters was addressed to the lawyer in the inter- 
est of Democracy, urging him to become a candi- 
date for the Chancellorship, and argued though 
the district was Whig the lawyer could unite the 
Democrats and surely be elected. This looked 
plausible, but if successful would have been an 
election by a minority. This would neither have 
been satisfactory or right ; besides Judge Williams 
was esteemed by the lawyer too highly to defeat 
him by such a course. The proffered Chancellor- 
ship was therefore declined. To gratify his friends 
and to express his own views of the considerations 
that should control candidates and people, under 
the mode of electing judges, the lawyer prepared 
and had published the following address : 

"To the people of the First Judicial Circuit of 
Tennessee : The Constitution of the State adopted 
in convention, in the year 1834, has been amended, 
as provided for in that instrument, and the election 
of judicial officers heretofore made by the Legisla- 
ture is to be hereafter made by the people them- 
selves. This amendment of the Constitution, 
and the law necessary to carry it into effect, may 
be regarded as the beginning of a new era in the 
history of the judiciary of Tennessee. The principle 
thus introduced simplifies the mode of election, 
and brings the candidate for judicial station into 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 9/ 

direct responsibility to the true sovereignty of 
the land. It dispenses with that intermediate 
agency in those elections which removes the ap- 
pointment of judicial officers, of the higher grade, 
a step beyond the direct agency of the pop- 
ular will. I regard this as a new test presented to 
the country, by which to try the great Republican 
doctrine, * That man is capable of self-govern- 
ment.' And if the people should exhibit the like 
wisdom and discriminating judgment in the elec- 
tion of men, * honest, and capable to fill the ju- 
dicial offices, which they have generally displayed 
in the choice of their public servants in other de- 
partments, ' the wisdom and patriotism of the 
projectors of this new Constitutional regulation 
will be fully vindicated. I have an abiding confi- 
dence that such will be our experience. 

*' One ground upon which apprehensions have 
been entertained by some, that this mode of elec- 
tion would not work well in practice, is the fear 
that the election of judges would be mingled with 
and controlled by the ' party politics ' of the day. 
In other words, that men will be chosen to fill 
judicial stations, not because they are more worthy 
or better qualified than others seeking the position, 
but because they happen to belong to the domi- 
nant political party of the circuit, district or State. 

** I am fully informed of the fact that the Demo- 
cratic party (to which I have belonged before and 
since I attained the age of twenty-one years, and 
in whose doctrines and associations I have lived 
9 



98 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

for twenty-five years) has an undoubted ascendency 
in this judicial circuit. But in announcing myself 
a candidate for the office of Judge of the First 
Judicial Circuit, as I now do, I declare my sincere 
conviction that this office has no necessary connec- 
tion with political organization, and should have 
none. That in my judgment the purity of the 
judicial ermine, and the impartial administration of 
the laws, demand a perpetual separation of the 
judicial office from the action of political party as- 
sociations. 

''He who shall be intrusted with the arbitrament 
of life, liberty and property under the law, should 
know no man by any party name or association, 
but the claims of every aspirant to judicial honors 
should rest upon his * learning, his probity, his 
impartiality, and his independence.' Every can- 
didate for judicial station must submit his claim to 
these characteristics and qualifications to the or- 
deal of public judgment. The man who possesses 
them most eminently, whether he be Whig or 
Democrat, should be the chosen incumbent of this 
office. 

*Tn consistency with the opinions here expressed, 
I shall adopt no system of electioneering for the 
appointment, which I ask at the hands of my fel- 
low-citizens. I shall attend the courts in the sev- 
eral counties in the circuits yet to be held, 
which I usually attend before the election, to the 
end that I may extend my acquaintance with the 
people. Beyond this I shall make no effort, con- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 99 

scientiously believing that the judicial office should 
not be sought by means usually employed in polit- 
ical and popular elections. And upon whomsoever 
conferred by popular suffrage, it should be ac- 
cepted with diffidence, in view of the high respon- 
sibilities which it involves. 

*' I close this short address, and commit the result 
of the election to my fellow-citizens, with the as- 
surance that if I am regarded as well qualified 
for this office, and shall be appointed to it by the 
people, I promise that the best powers, moral and 
intellectual, which I possess shall be employed 
in the discharge of its duties. If the choice shall 
fall upon some more worthy citizen, I shall be con- 
tent. February 23, 1854." 

This circular letter did not strike the key-note 
to which the Democratic tune had been set, so 
that the music went on, but the lawyer's voice was 
not heard, even in the base. That first election, un- 
der that constitutional amendment, has been fol- 
lowed up to this day, demonstrating that no office 
is too sacred to be prostituted for the purposes of 
political factions. The lawyer hoped that it would 
be otherwise, not so much for his personal advan- 
tage as the good of the country. 

Some of the interests of mankind can not be 
safely intrusted to the masses of the population of 
any country. Men may talk about the dignity of 
human nature, and spin pretty theories of the 
doctrine of ** equal rights" and privileges, so 
much asserted, and so little respected or practiced. 



100 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

But it is not true that all men have equal rights 
and liberties, in the popular sense of the phrase. 
Rights in the abstract and rights in the concrete 
are often widely different. Rights are largely ac- 
cidental. Both physical and mental capacity and 
culture, with many other incidents, make distinc- 
tions among men of the world (and of the same 
country as well), upon which rights arise that 
others have not. It is true every man has nat- 
ural rights according to his capacities and oppor- 
tunities, but they are so diversified as to make 
real differences amongst men, which are recognized 
in all communities, and should have their influ- 
ence upon all subjects which require mental and 
moral culture to their proper adjustment for the 
benefit of all classes. To illustrate by a homely 
example : Here is a man with a crushed limb ; 
amputation is necessary to save the man's life. 
Here is a butcher, and there is a skillful surgeon. 
Which should perform this very delicate opera- 
tion? Do you say that the butcher would have 
the right if the wounded man should be willing? 
No ; because it is a duty to preserve human life 
and relieve human suffering, and the best avail- 
able means are to be employed. Civilized com- 
munities are subject to laws which are intended 
to apply to every material and social interest of 
the individual. These laws are often changed by 
amendment or repealed, sometimes very inartifi- 
cially framed. But such as they are, they make 
what is called a system, so varied and ofteyi 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. lOI 

SO intricate as to require the most experienced 
and well-trained legal mind to apply them prop- 
erly. Indeed, at this day there is such obscurity 
in the relations of the law and actual cases that 
a distinguished lawyer recently said : ** Throw a 
sheep into the court of final resort, you can not 
tell whether it will come out a bed blanket or a 
wool hat." 

It will not be denied that the best moral char- 
acter, and the most cultivated and legal talent, are 
required in that most sacred official station, in 
which not only the property and rights of the 
citizen, but his liberty and life itself are often at 
stake. How are such qualifications to be se- 
cured? By the suffrage of the man that can 
neither read nor write his own name, but can 
drink a quart of whisky ''per diem," blaspheme 
his Maker, and neither knows or regards law or 
religion ; or that other class, though temperate, 
yet from ignorance follow the lead of the dema- 
gogue, who happens to win them by flattery or 
favor ; or those buccaneers, whose business it is 
to buy votes for the man who employs and pays 
them ? 

The philosophy of human government is so lit- 
tle understood by large masses of population, 
they can not discriminate between the fit and the 
unfit in the least responsible office, and as the 
consequence such offices are often filled with bad 
men. Detocqueville said many years ago, "The 
best men were not in public offices in America." 



I02 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

Nor are they now. The worst feature of univer- 
sal suffrage is its constant tendency to demoral- 
ization, and all past history of the race proves 
that strictly popular government can not stand 
upon any other foot than popular virtue. A de- 
moralized people must become anarchical, and this 
anarchy will ultimately bring to the top the brain 
and wealth, which had been hiding out as from a 
tempest, and by their inherent forces combined 
crush the multitude to slavish subjection. 

Despotisms are begotten of licentious liberty. 
Our Government was not intended to be a despot- 
ism or a democracy, but a constitutional repub- 
lic. Whatever, therefore, is appropriate to the 
preservation of this conservative system should be 
recognized as right. Do you employ a carpenter 
to shoe your horse, or a blacksmith to build your 
house ? All agencies suppose the capacity of the 
agent to do the business intrusted to him in a 
proper manner. If the employer has no capacity 
to judge of such qualifications, he can make no 
prudent choice in matters which involve so many 
and important rights and interests as judicial 
office. The ' ' conservative principle, the rock of 
national safety," should exclude from the exercise 
of suffrage all who can not choose an incumbent 
of judicial office intelligently. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. IO3 



A 

CHAPTER XV. 

An incident of the lawyer's connection with the 
old estate, before mentioned, was the sale of a 
body of land lying in one of the States, for a 
certain sum in hand, and a further sum upon the 
procurement of a clear title to the land. Ten 
thousand dollars were supposed to be at stake, 
The lawyer determined to make another effort to 
close up this contract. To accomplish this object 
it was thought best to ascertain at the General 
Land. Office, at Washington, D. C, what would 
be required by that office to authorize the issuance 
of a patent for the land. He went to Washington, 
and spent several days in correspondence with that 
office, and obtained special instructions as to the 
papers which must be procured. These instruc- 
tions made it necessary to go to the district where 
the land lay. To the Land Office there he went, 
and as he supposed obtained copies of all needful 
papers. Returning to Washington, these papers 
were presented to the Commissioner of the Gen- 
eral Land Office. After some days' delay, the 
lawyer was informed it would be necessary to get 
certain other papers at the capitol of another 
State. He repaired thither, obtained the papers, 
returned to Washington, and laid the same before 



104 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the Commissioners. After further delay he was 
told it would be necessary to return to the District 
Land Office, file the papers, and get a plat and 
survey from that office. The lawyer resumed his 
long peregrination, reached the District Land Of- 
fice, had the papers filed, and plat and survey 
made. Now, of course, the patent must come. 
But a question was then made, whether some of 
the entries in the survey had not been withdrawn, 
and thus left the survey unsupported as to several 
hundred acres of the land. The Commissioner 
thought it needful that new warrants be obtained 
and filed to supply this possible defect. This 
would require the outlay of several hundred dol- 
lars. The lawyer had left home with ^150, and 
had procured $200 more on the way. But he had 
been traveling and living at hotels for two months 
or more, and was short of cash required to buy 
the new warrants. In this emergency a former 
Senator in Congress introduced the lawyer to a 
money-lender in Washington, from whom he ob- 
tained the sum of $600. He was able to pay for 
the warrants if they could be procured. Did any 
one ever hear of a case when capital, great or 
small, sought an investment and could not find it ? 
The lawyer found a man who could procure the 
warrants, but he must go to the capitol of another 
State to get them. He went, and after a great 
deal of searching and sifting found them and pur- 
chased them. Back again to Washington the 
lawyer sped, and sat down in his hotel to await 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. IO5 

the receipt of the patent. Presently, a paper was 
handed to him. Upon opening it, instead of the 
patent was a notice that a caveat had been sent to 
that office of the Commissioner, averring the very 
defects in the survey which the lawyer had been at 
so much labor and expense to cure under the 
direction of the Commissioner, and the Commis- 
sioner declined to issue the patent. The lawyer 
could not conceal his indignation and contempt, 
and expressed himself in terms which he regretted 
when the paroxysm passed. 

It was grossly unjust to refuse the patent with- 
out requiring the caveator to furnish the evidence 
to support his caveat, instead of throwing that 
additional labor and expense on the lawyer. But 
the caveator was a land pirate, and the lawyer be- 
came satisfied he had fallen into bad company, and 
left Washington in disgust. He was more con- 
firmed in his conviction soon after his return upon 
the receipt of a letter from the money-lender, de- 
manding a sum nearly double the amount bor- 
rowed. The lawyer paid him his debt with fair 
interest through the Hon. A. V. Brown, and there 
the matter rested. Thus, the lawyer spent about 
;^i,ooo in trying to get a title to land that was 
clearly his in equity, under the direction of offi- 
cers of the Government, and was finally refused 
the title. This was law administered by a limb 
of this ** great, free, enlightened Republican Gov- 
ernment." 

This case is not paraded in the expectation of 



I06 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

securing sympathy. It is the pubhc who are most 
interested to know how pubhc trusts are admin- 
istered. Bad laws, if honestly administered, are 
better than good laws abused by perversion and 
maladministration. If private and individual rights 
are disregarded by those in power, it is morally 
certain that the public welfare will be in imminent 
peril. Is not such official obliquity the legitimate 
result of that popular demoralization which springs 
from licentious liberty, reflected through the office- 
holder? It is certainly anomalous to expect a pure 
head to a badly diseased body politic. The repre- 
sentative is the type of his constituency. 

On another occasion the lawyer was in the po- 
litical ** Hub of the nation," and fully equipped 
with the needful documents to collect a small sum 
of money due the estate of a dead soldier. The 
lawyer repaired to headquarters of a certain Au- 
ditor, who referred him to an officer of an inferior 
grade, and he to another of still lower dignity. 
After, passing through these various laboratories 
of red tape, he found the bottom authority in the 
premises. Presenting the papers, the official 
glanced over them, and turning from his desk coolly 
remarked, ''The papers are not regular." ''What 
is the defect ? " said the lawyer. The man began 
some sort of criticism. As the lawyer looked him 
full in the'face the man stopped and said, "What 
is your name ? " The lawyer stated it. "What 
are you?" "All right, you shall have the money," 
and it was paid. If the papers were not regular, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 10/ 

the money should not have been paid ; if they 
were regular, the objection should not have been 
made. Official station does not change a man's 
character. Whatever vice or weakness may be in 
him will be developed in his official conduct when- 
ever a proper occasion or opportunity occurs. 
"Prosperity in any form is hard to bear." Weak 
minds are often ruined by it, and strong minds are 
apt to exhibit whatever ugliness they may have 
succeeded in concealing theretofore. 

The incidents stated in this chapter occurred be- 
fore the late civil war, and in view of the * * spots 
in official life, which discolor the history of the 
nation during and since that war, they are very di- 
minutive in importance." They were like little 
electric flashes as the Storm King peers over the 
low and distant horizon, slowly bringing up the 
winds and waters of a mighty tempest. There 
is little doubt that political leaders looked to a 
dissolution of the union of the States long before 
the rebellion had taken definite form in any State ; 
and, doubtless, many office-holders, like the 
"wreckers" of a sinking ship, made the most 
of their opportunities. The contagion of such a 
sentiment would necessarily spread from the head 
of the official through the bodies of subordinates, 
and the sequel "proved corruption undisguised 
and flagrant." 



I08 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

There is a sickly sentiment prevailing more or 
less extensively, that the greatest rebellion in the 
history of nations was the result of honest differ- 
ences of opinion upon several subjects affecting 
private rights and national authority. That there 
were some Southern men who thought revolution 
the only remedy for evils which they really believed 
to be already, or about to be, inflicted upon the 
Southern States may be admitted, but they were 
neither the majority nor the chief leaders in the 
movement. The Rebellion was the natural prod- 
uct of that pride and lust of power born of slav- 
ery and cradled with the infancy of Southern aris- 
tocracy. Republicanism and slavery are elemen- 
tary and practical antipodes. The son of a South- 
ern planter was necessarily an autocrat; and the 
daughter, a princess born to command. Obedience 
was its correlative in the slave and the poor, as 
well. Pampered by the power of its staple prod- 
ucts in the commercial world, which brought the 
nutriment to pride and luxury ; natural tempera- 
ment quickened by contiguity to the tropics ; igno- 
rance and dependence of the masses of the poor 
— liberty was a name ; servitude the fact. Political 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. IO9 

leaders with the mother's milk imbibed the fancy 
of individual importance and Southern superiority. 
This imagination was carried into the political 
lives of such leaders, and was carried into South- 
ern legislation and diplomacy. It was this spirit 
which forced the Constitutional Convention in 1787 
to allow Southern property to be represented in 
the National Councils, which had no support in 
reason or equity, but stood alone upon assumption 
of right because the Southern slaveholder claimed 
to represent man and woman who were, under the 
municipal law, his property. If they were prop- 
erty, then they stood upon the footing with cattle 
and other chattels. In that convention, South 
Carolina and Georgia evinced that spirit of dicta- 
tion which characterized their subsequent history, 
as leading in the crusade upon human rights, 
by the bold declaration, ''That slavery should 
continue or no federal union would be formed." 
In the debate upon slavery in that convention, 
Luther Martin, of Maryland, said: ''Slavery is 
inconsistent with the principles of the revolution 
and dishonorable to the American character to 
have such a feature in the Constitution. " Rutledge, 
of South Carolina, said: "Religion and humanity 
have nothing to do with this question. Interest 
alone is the governing principle with nations." 
This last utterance was the key to Southern poli- 
tics; pride, luxury and vanity on the one hand, 
and pecuniary interest on the other — the money 
value of the slave, estimated not only by the cash 



no THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

value of slave labor, but more by the exemption 
of the master from honest toil and the indulgence 
afforded to indolence and ease. It may be doubt- 
ed whether South Carolina and Georgia entered 
the Union under the Constitution without mental 
reservation. One of their most distinguished del- 
egates to the convention said to his people on his 
return : ' * Slavery has achieved great advantages 
by the terms of the Union." And this vantage 
ground was maintained, and the open aggressions 
of this power marked the history of the nation to 
the time of its overthrow. Having passed through 
a seven years' war and just emerged from its fire 
and blood, surrounded by territory occupied by 
savages or claimed by "crowned heads," these 
two States, impelled by necessity common to all, 
urged the colonists to unite in a more permanent 
union, yet must conserve slavery or form no union. 
The fact that these States would have slavery rec- 
ognized in the Constitution, in direct conflict with 
the fundamental principles upon which the Govern- 
ment was to be founded, clearly reveals their silent 
thought that the union would be temporary, for sen- 
sible men could not be persuaded that a compact 
made upon a compromise of principles so directly 
repugnant could long endure ; therefore the slave 
power sought, in various ways, to manipulate the 
territories and shape the policies of the Union to the 
extension of its influence and the perpetuation of 
its existence ; doubtless determined if it could not 
control the Union, it would withdraw peaceably, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. Ill 

if it could; "forcibly, if it must." The Federal- 
ist, in its edition of 1802, after referring to the 
great utility of the union, said: "But the fact is, 
that we have it already whispered in private circles 
that the thirteen States are of too great extent for 
any general system, and that we must, of necessity, 
resort to separate confederacy of distinct portions 
of the whole. This doctrine will in all probabil- 
ity be gradually propagated, until it has votaries 
enough to countenance its open avowal." A 
prophecy fulfilled in 1861 in a most tangible form. 
It is probably the general truth that some 
Southern politicians at and after the adoption of 
the Federal Constitution looked to the disruption 
of the Union as a desirable event, whenever the 
same could be accomplished with safety to South- 
ern institutions. To do this and to people South- 
ern territory, and extend the area of their favored 
system, was a prime object. The cession of terri- 
tory by North Carolina and Georgia to the United 
States, with the condition as to slavery; the pur- 
chase of Louisiana and Florida, and last, yet very 
important, the annexation of Texas, rapidly ma- 
tured Southern policy. The discussions upon the 
tariff and internal improvements in the light of re- 
cent history should be regarded, perhaps, as a "sop 
to Cerberus" to cover the main design, which prob- 
ably was to throw off the Northern and Northwest- 
ern States, annex Mexico, and push the slave 
conquest to Cape Horn. Thus, in the language 
of a member of the Confederate Congress to the 



\ 



112 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

lawyer in 1863 : * 'Build a great golden government 
homogeneous in interests and policy, whose power 
and glory would eclipse all other nations." This 
was, doubtless, the ideal of Southern ambition, 
and all those differences of opinion touching priv- 
ate rights and national authority were only used as 
fuel to the flame, which broke out in such fiery 
conflict in the rebellion. Notwithstanding the 
teachings of the lawyer's first legal preceptor, 
who was a Federalist in theory — "A government 
by the people, and for the people; with liberty 
and equality within the law," was to the lawyer's 
mind captivating ; and without discriminating be- 
tween a Democratic confederation on the one 
hand, and a constitutional republic on the other, 
he allied himself .with the Democratic Party, as it 
claimed to be the people's party. The coldness 
of that party towards him personally, nor the 
smaller errors into which it fell from time to time, 
did not unsettle his judgment as to its general 
policy as a national party. He had been educated 
to love the Union, the work of the fathers; to 
venerate their names muah after the manner of 
the Israelites towards their great leader and law- 
giver, Moses, the greatest man in history. The 
possibility of dissolving the Union did not enter 
his mind. By common consent, it seemed to be 
the best government in the world, and in his un- 
sophisticated simplicity he supposed men too good 
to do what would be so bad. A slaveholder him- 
self, as his father had been before him, familiar 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. II3 

with the institution in its milder forms, and know- 
ing that many slave owners were not satisfied with 
the Christian morality of the system and held such 
property only under an habitual protest, he could 
not believe the whole people of any State would 
be induced to fight for the preservation and per- 
petuation of an institution so repugnant to Amer- 
ican ideas of liberty, and which, by its increase of 
members, must wear out, however some particular 
localities might struggle to keep it alive. Of one 
thing he felt assured, that the free States, having 
recognized the slaveholders' right to hold such 
property, would not attempt to deprive them of it 
without a fair compensation. Feeling no serious 
apprehension of danger from this source, the 
lawyer continued to practice and took little or no 
interest in the political contest going on between 
the years of 1855 and i860. The national admin- 
istration was Democratic; the offices were gener- 
ally in the hands of the Democrats; Democratic 
policy was in the ascendency, and he could see 
nothing in the political outlook to give Democracy, 
as such, any serious alarm. Abraham Lincoln 
had been nominated by what was called the ''Black 
Republican Party," but Douglas had beaten him 
on his own soil in Illinois. John Bell was nomi- 
nated by the Whig Party, and nothing could defeat 
the Democratic Party but dissension in the party. 
The question who should lead the "Democratic 
hosts to victory" at first seemed the only one. 
Douglas, of Illinois, could undoubtedly be elect- 
10 



114 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

ed. A conservative Democrat, of ability inferior 
to none and of the highest national reputation, 
his nomination by the Democratic Convention 
could scarcely be doubted by those who were not 
informed of the secret purpose of Southern slave- 
holders; these had been " wide awake " watching 
their opportunity. It had come. President Buch- 
anan was a ''weak, old man;" Floyd, his Secre- 
tary of War, Southern to the zenith and corrupt 
as Judas Iscariot; Thompson, of Mississippi, and 
Cobb, of Georgia, in the Interior and Treasury 
Departments ; and Jerry Black, Attorney-General. 
The Secretary of State, General Lewis Cass, was 
the only loyal man in the Cabinet ; and when Buch- 
anan, under the influence of traitorous Secreta- 
ries, refused to reinforce Fort Sumter, General Cass 
indignantly rebuked the action of the Cabinet by 
resigning his position, no more willing to sanction 
treason in this instance than when he broke his 
sword rather than resign it upon the traitorous 
surrender of Hull. The future historian, if truth- 
ful, will give this President and his counselors 
their proper place in that dark and bloody page 
of the nation's history. 

The lawyer did not begin to realize the danger 
until the disruption of the Democratic Convention. 
This fact presented a case for thought and inquiry, 
''What was the objection to Douglas?" It could 
be nothing else than his conservative views of slav- 
ery and its rights under the Constitution. The 
"Dred Scott Decision" of the Supreme Court of 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. II5 

the United States had affirmed and settled the 
right of the slaveholder to take his property into 
any Territory of the United States. The only 
open question then was, ** Shall the people of the 
Territory, when organizing a State government, 
provide in their constitution for the existence of 
slavery as a domestic institution within such State, 
or exclude it as the people may choose? and shall 
Congress admit such State into the Union, with or 
without slavery, as its constitution may provide?" 
There could be but one side to this question. No 
sane man would deny the right of the people of 
the Territory to frame their constitution either 
way. The only inquiry Congress could properly 
make would have been to the number of inhabit- 
ants and the republican form of the proposed 
government. Again, who were the ''bolters" 
from the convention ? Southern slaveholders and 
their sympathizers as to slavery. What, then, does 
it all mean? Dissolution of the Union ; a divided 
Democracy could not succeed. When Breckin- 
ridge was nominated by his slaveholding conven- 
tion, as Douglas was by the conservative Demo- 
crats, the purpose was palpable. Breckinridge 
and his convention knew he could not be elected; 
nor Douglas, nor Bell. To divide the Democracy 
was to secure the election of Abraham Lincoln. 
And it is now evident that it was intended by the 
slaveholders to furnish a ground upon which to 
rouse the passions of the masses and fire the 
Southern heart. The contest was to be manifest- 



Il6 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

ly between Lincoln, Breckinridge and Douglas. 
Bell weakened. Breckinridge and Bell, both being 
Southern men, left no substantial support for Judge 
Douglas in the South. That Bell was brought out 
through the intrigues of the slaveholders to make 
Lincoln's election sure will not be averred. But 
it is certain that that was its effect, and it is also 
certain that Bell's Southern supporters generally 
went into the rebellion. The Presidential candL 
.dates all in the field, the canvass opened. Yancey 
and others traversed the South ostensibly in the 
support of Breckinridge, but, really, by fierce, 
fiery harangues to prepare the people for revolt. 
The lawyer was at one of Yancey's appointments, 
but his purpose was so palpably traitorous that the 
lawyer could not listen and left in utter disgust. 
From that time his mind was fixed. Breckinridge 
was a native of Kentucky, and was raised upon the 
same * 'blue-grass soil" as the lawyer. His per- 
sonal preferences would have been for him, but 
the **odor of treason" was all around his nomina- 
tion. As a Democrat, Douglas must be his 
choice. The lawyer wrote out and published the 
following paper : 

"To the Democracy of Tennessee : Those who 
support the candidates of the bolters from the Na- 
tional Conventions at Charleston and Baltimore 
are sincerely and earnestly asked to consider the 
subjects presented in the inquiries which are here 
propounded. Assuming that the National Demo- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 11/ 

cratic Party stood united and harmonious upon 
the Cincinnati platform of 1856, I ask: 

"I. What Mr. Breckinridge understands to be 
the difference in the platform of 1856, unanimously 
adopted at Cincinnati, and the ''Bolters" platform 
adopted at Charleston, upon which Mr. Breckin- 
ridge now stands as a candidate for the Presidency? 

*'2. Does the ** Bolters" platform affirm or deny 
the doctrine of intervention or non-intervention ? 

**3. If it affirms the doctrine of intervention, 
then how does it agree with the Cincinnati plat- 
form of 1856, which declares most positively the 
doctrine of non-intervention? 

'%, If it asserts the doctrine of non-interven- 
tion, then in what particular does Mr. Breckin- 
ridge differ from Mr. Douglas upon the question? 

''5. If Mr. Breckinridge is for intervention, 
when and how does he propose to apply it to 
slavery in the Territories? 

"6. If Congress may intervene to protect slav- 
ery in the Territories, must it not have the * cor- 
relative right to exclude ' slavery from the Territo- 
ries? 

"7. If Congress were to pass an act directly to 
protect slavery in a Territory, would such act be 
subject to revision and constitutional interpretation 
by the Supreme Court of the United States ? 

"8. If the Supreme Court of the United States 
may review the action of Congress and settle the 
question of protection to slavery under it, may 
not the Supreme Court do the same thing under 



Il8 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

an act of the Territorial Legislature, unfriendly to 
slavery? 

* * 9. If the rights of the slaveholder in a Terri- 
tory can and must be settled by the judicial author- 
ities upon any breach of their rights by territorial 
legislation, what is the use of Congressional inter- 
vention ? 

"10. Is not all legislation by Congress upon the 
subject of slavery in the Territories directly pro- 
hibited in the * Dred Scott Decision?' If so, 
shall that judgment be evaded by the specious 
terms of an enactment which declares protection 
to all property? 

"II. If the people elect delegates to a National 
Convention to nominate candidates for President 
and Vice-President, and that convention organizes 
according to the forms of deliberative assemblies 
and the usages of the party, and a minority (for 
any cause) choose to secede, where do such seced- 
ers get the authority to organize themselves into a 
convention, nominate candidates for President and 
Vice-President, and declare themselves the Nation- 
al Democratic Party? 

*'I2. Which will be the regular convention, that 
from which the seceders have bolted or the ''Bolt- 
ers" — the first retaining 212 votes, the last count- 
ing only 105 ? 

''13. If one delegate withdraw from such con- 
vention, is not his commission extinct? If an 
hundred withdraw, what is the difference if a quor- 
um is left? 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I I9 

''14. Is not the 'Southern League' or 'Golden 
Circle' a 'disunion' organization? 

"15. Are not the principal instruments and 
movers in the secession from the National Demo- 
cratic Convention members of the 'League?' 

"16. Was not the union of the National Demo- 
cratic Party the bond of the union of the States? 

"17. Is not secession revolution? (Secession 
from the convention is secession from the party.) 
To break up the party is to break this bond of the 
union of the States. Is not this revolution? 

"18. If this 'Southern League' and disunion 
party, headed by William L. Yancey, of Alabama, 
has been able to draw off from the National De- 
mocracy of the Cotton States upon the abstract 
question of Congressional protection to slavery in 
the Territories, then, knowing the sentiment in the 
North and West upon this question, and the abso- 
lute power to control the action of Congress by 
these, must not these seceders and bolters have 
already taken the initiative to dissolution of the 
union of the States by their bolt at Charleston, to 
be fully consummated if Abraham Lincoln should 
be elected President in this canvass? 

"19. If Mr. Breckinridge is the candidate of the 
seceders and bolters, is he not in principle a seceder 
and bolter from the National Democratic Party? 

"20. If to dissolve the Democratic Party (the 
union of which was the bond of the union of the 
States) be revolutionary, then is not Mr. Breckin- 
ridge a "revolutionary candidate?" 



120 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

"21. If this party is sectional — staking the union 
upon a question of merely local interest — then is 
he not a sectional candidate? 

" 22. If disunion be a foregone conclusion with 
those who control his party, is he not a disunion 
candidate ? 

"23. If these things are so, ought he to be elected 
President of the United States in November next? 
I speak as unto wise men. Judge ye." 

A NATIONAL DEMOCRAT. 

Satisfied that Breckinridge had become the 
synonym of division, the lawyer thought it the 
duty of every loyal man to throw himself abreast 
of this traitorous tide. He immediately opened 
correspondence with prominent men upon the 
subject of* an electoral ticket for Douglas in 
Tennessee. The following letter is from a lawyer, 
a former member of Congress, and an able stump 

speaker. 

July 14, i860. 
Dear Sir : 

Your favor of the 13th has just been received. 
I give you the right hand of fellowship. Truly I 
am a Douglas man, not because he is an original, 
consistent, pure Democrat, but because he is all 
that, and more than that. He is a true patriot, a 
broad national Democrat, knowing no North nor 
South. He is the greatest man left in the Senate, 
and I believe the greatest in the union. He has 
been more unjustly treated by the leaders of the 
southern wing of Democracy than any other man. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 121 

There is an attempt to hoodwink the Democrats 
of Tennessee by closing every paper as to his 
claims, and not suffer the people to know the 
truth. Douglas is the regular nominee of the 
regular Democratic party. His ticket is national. 
Breckinridge is the ticket of the seceders from the 
regular convention. It is the seceding ticket from 
the union, and nobody pretends that he can be 
elected. All he can do is to secure the election 
of Lincoln, and this is the purpose and end of all 
their doings. They desire to see Lincoln elected, 
and they think the South will declare for disunion 
in a body. This is the whole project, and a more 
infernal one was never set on foot. I am sorry to 

say that , who professed to think Douglas a 

great and good man, has gone with Patterson, Mil- \ 
ligan and Johnson (et id oimie germs). I am very 
much ashamed of him, but I have never said a 
word to him about it. If we can organize a 
ticket, and have a canvass, and get a few Douglas 
documents before the people, we can carry the 
State. I am willing to do anything I can, but the 
ticket ought, if possible, to be composed of orig- 
inal Democrats. Our friend. Col. C , has an 

opportunity to make himself a great man. Last 
time I talked with him he was for Douglas. 
James Britton, Sr., is a Douglas man, and would 
make a good elector. I think John McLin, Esq., of 
Jonesborough, would make a good elector, and 
many others. I am almost too old to canvass the 
whole State, or even the district. But neither 



\ 



122 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

ticket shall go unfilled for the want of my name. 
The 28th will be on Saturday of the first week of 

the court at . I expect court will be there 

two weeks. Write to the Democrats and stir 
them up ; that is all they want. Also write to 
some of the executive committee; tell them to 
send documents, or let us know where they are to 
be got, and we will furnish names. I am for put- 
ting the Democrats in the lead and backing them 
with all my strength. 

In much haste, I am you obedient servant. 

It is here seen where Andrew Johnson, Esq., 
late President, ''Judge Sam'l " Milligan, Judge of 
the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and subse- 
quently appointed by Johnson to a seat in the 
Court of Claims, and David T. Patterson, then 
Judge of the First Judicial Circuit in Tennessee, 
son-in-law of Andrew Johnson, and afterwards 
Senator in Congress when Johnson was President, 
all stood in the presidential election in i860. How 
they were metamorphosed into such prominent 
Republicans and got so well paid for it is not 
stated. When the war was over Johnson's Dem- 
ocracy had revived and become so invigorated that 
Republicans were made to wonder with a great 
astonishment at the agility displayed in jumping 
upon the foremost horse after Breckinridge's defeat, 
claiming to have been riding the foremost horse 
all the time, and when a new race was to be run, 
and a new stake to be put up, they dismounted 
and mounted a pony of their own. It was deter- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 23 

mined to have a convention at Nashville with a 
view to organize an electoral ticket in the State 
for Douglas. The lawyer went to Nashville and 
did what he could in aid of the movement. At his 
instance, James Britton, Jr., was appointed elec- 
tor for the first district, and the whole ticket 
filled up by the convention. A Douglas paper 
was started at Nashville. It was a forlorn hope, 
but a resolute purpose by loyal men to resist trea- 
son, and the Douglas paper uttered no uncertain 
sound. For some reason James Britton, Jr., 
declined to accept the electorship of the first dis- 
trict The central committee immediately wrote 
to the lawyer that he must take his place, which 
he promptly did. Hon. James W. Deadick, the 
present Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of 
Tennessee, was the Bell elector ; Hon. Albert G. 
Watkins, former member of the House (now a 
Methodist minister), was the Breckinridge elector. 
The Bell platform was "the union, the Constitu- 
tion and the enforcement of laws." The Breckin- 
ridge platform, intervention by Congress, to pro- 
tect slavery in the territories. The Douglas plat- 
form, that Congress should not intervene to pro- 
tect or exclude slavery from the territories, but to 
leave the slave question to be settled by the peo- 
ple of the territories upon the formation of a State 
government. If the slave States could people the 
territories so as to give the ''slaveholders" a 
numerical majority so as to secure a constitution 
favorable to their system, they could do so ; if not. 



\ 



124 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

.they had no right to complain. The rule of 
majorities in Republican government should not 
be disturbed. 

It is not believed that either " Deadrick " or 
Watkins saw through the slaveholders' plot, though 
from the force of surroundings they both became 
identified with the Rebellion. Though John Bell 
received the electoral votes of both Tennessee and 
Kentucky (beating Breckinridge in his own State), 
his subsequent conduct had much to do with the 
future relation of his supporters to the union. 
The supporters of Bell generally in those two States 
were rebels, or neutral Tennessee could not have 
been forced into the Southern Confederacy with- 
out the complicity of Bell and his counselors. 
The masses of that party were loyal ; but in Ten- 
nessee, as in any other State which went into the Re- 
bellion, the leading politicians in whom the common 
people confided took advantage of that confidence, 
and by false representations of the acts and de- 
signs of the Republican party, led the people to 
believe their rights had been and Avere to be in- 
vaded, and thus roused the spirit of resistance to 
an imaginary evil. Thus many who were really in- 
terested that slavery should be abolished (because 
that labor was in direct conflict with their own), by 
the selfish demagogism of such politicians, were 
made to fight against their own interests, while 
many others who had Hved all their lives under the 
shadow of the negro quarters, and had been 
treated by the lords little better than their slaves, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 125 

from the force of habit, and an ingrained sense of 
dependence, followed the bidding of the master 
without regard to the right or wrong of their con- 
duct. It was remarkable that amongst the com- 
mon soldiers in the rebel service there was almost 
a total absence of expressed opinion as to the > 
right or wrong of the Rebellion. The sentiment \ 
most frequently heard was, '' We live in the South 
and must go with our section or State." Nothing 
impressed the lawyer mind as to the insecurity of 
popular government more than the facility with 
which demagogues led many of the people into 
the Rebellion. Perhaps three-fourths of the rank 
and file of the rebel armies had scarcely a thought 
of the nature of the conflict beyond that they be- 
loncfed to Dixie, while their enemies were from 
the North, — such is unreasoning man — under the 
influence of ignorance, prejudice and passion. 

The election of Mr. Lincoln, which was the 
purpose of the Southern Democracy in breaking 
up the Democratic party, made war inevitable. 
Compromise was simply impossible. The fatal 
step had been taken. In the first compromise, 
which recognized slavery in 1787 by the Constitu- 
tion, the Missouri compromise, and that of 1850 
had twice averted civil war, but now the United 
States must become the propagandist of slavery, or 
yield to the dissolution of the union, or fight. 



126 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

The belief of the natural inferiority of the 
colored race, not merely the African, but all black 
people, had been taught in the colonies before the 
Revolutionary war of 1776. The belief rested on the 
accidental condition of the colored population, 
and had no other foundation than that upon which 
the distinctions in social life have and always will 
exist. Mental culture, which imparts knowledge, 
gives power over ignorance, and subjects to its 
control both men and things. The Creator made 
all men of one blood, and inferiority of races can 
only be predicated upon geographical differences, 
climates, soils, physical, intellectual and moral cul- 
ture. There is therefore no natural but an arti- 
ficial distinction — whatever be the color of men or 
races. But as Rutledge, of South Carolina, said : 
"Interest is the principle which governs nations 
and neither humanity nor religion. So, in the 
Southern States interest blinded the eyes of both 
humanity and religion so utterly, that their relig- 
ious teachers declared slavery of the black man 
the divine right of the white man." But as the 
Lord said to the prophet in Israel, " I have re- 
served more than seven thousand men who have 
not bowed the knee to Baal," so there were in 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 12/ 

the Southern States thousands who believed the 
Bible taught a better doctrine than Southern 
politicians or slaved lords, and if they must fight, 
determined to fight on the side of the Bible. The 
Southern leaders were well aware of this fact and 
adopted the most unfair and cruel policy to avert 
its consequences. The future historian, when he 
recounts the measures adopted and executed by 
the conspirators to destroy the Union, will call 
these acts by their proper names. In our ex- 
uberant charity now, in which a large element 
of personal and political interests is very visible, 
we use soft speeches and honeyed phrases. But 
the motives of this sort of milky, watery, soapy 
slop will pass away and the truth covered up by 
interest will rise again in the sunlight of the 
future and be as immortal as history itself Such 
historians will tell how Isham G. Harris and 
his corrupt Legislature carried the State of Ten- 
nessee in their breeches pockets into the Southern 
Confederacy ; how Fletcher, Wise and others 
slipped the Confederate cord around the neck of 
old Virginia ; how Breckinridge and Buckner and 
McGuffin tried to make the home of Henry Clay 
a habitation for traitors; and Claiborne Jackson 
tried to steal Missouri from the Union. It has 
well been said *' posterity is an impartial judge." 
And no matter how the paid eulogist or the 
partial partisan exaggerates what is good, or 
palliates what is bad, time's ultimate verdict is 
always discriminating and just. The idea of the 



128 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

black man's natural inferiority, which was so long 
expressed and acted on as public opinion, was in 
fact a popular prejudice, described in the lan- 
guage of another as assigning to the black man a 
condition between the man and the brute, some- 
times the one and sometimes the other. Man as 
an element of political power accountable and 
punishable; brute for all other purposes. This 
prejudice permeated large communities because 
of the recognition of slavery in the Federal Con- 
stitution, and its traditional influences in the 
States which acquiesced in it as members of the 
Union, but repudiated it as States, and because 
the new States were largely peopled by immigra- 
tion from the old slave States ; this prejudice gave 
the war one of its most embarrassing features. 
Jeffersonian Democracy and slavery are not homo- 
geneous; but the slaveholders, rebellion and the 
Democratic party stood in the relation of earnest 
sympathy under the influence of party affinities 
and this popular prejudice ; in short, there was a 
large pro-slavery element in most of the Western 
States and some of the Middle States, as well, an 
incubus upon the government in its attempt to 
save the life of the nation. This pro-slavery prej- 
udice took to itself the name of conservatism, 
which an eloquent Congressman described as a 
''fossil petrifaction of humanity in want of the 
ability to see the line of progress marked out by 
the hand of Omnipotence, and the want of energy 
to follow it." It was in fact a rearguard of the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 29 

Rebellion, wearing the livery of the Union to 
serve the interest of slavery. It is simply amazing 
to contemplate the consequences which may flow 
from a prejudice. A man-stealer makes captive 
an ignorant, black barbarian, sells him to some 
covetous wretch who enslaves him ; the venture is 
repeated and a trade established. None deny 
their humanity, rationality, accountability and 
immortality. Infants in knowledge, yet capable 
of Indefinite culture and improvement, they multi- 
ply as white people do, but they are slaves ; 
made so by men, and kept so by sordid interests. 
After while the black folks become an important 
factor in sectional productiveness. Denied the 
privileges of manhood, he assimilates to the 
brute in the mental conception of the owner, and 
is called a chattel. This idea is propagated, and 
the communities not specially interested in an- 
tagonism accept it without reflection, until it be- 
comes the popular idea. The older it grows the 
more inveterate it becomes, until it is part of the 
web and woof of society. There is an eye that 
never sleeps, looking on the crime of its inception, 
and the myriads of crimes which have marked its 
baneful bloody way will come up for judgment. 
The minister of mercy to the owner cries : Oh ! 
man, strike the manacles from your brother's 
hands and let the captive go free. He will not, but 
rivets the chains more tightly, and as the chains 
are tightened, so is the prejudice deepened. The 
years, the centuries, roll on ; the ever-open eye 



I30 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

looks on while the waters which flow from four 
million eyes, and the moans and sobs from four 
million hearts, broken by cruel bondage, swell in 
one long continued thunder-roll up to the throne 
of judgment. A voice from the throne is heard, 
calm, deep, solemn : The cup of iniquity is full. 
Mercy, return to your native sky. Dragons, from 
the fiery deep come forth, with all your imple- 
ments of death, and slay until the blood shall flow 
in rivers from sea to sea. 'Tis done. The master 
and the slave mingle their common gore, and their 
spirits ascend together to the place of judgment. 
Slavery is dead ; justice is vindicated ; but is the 
prejudice dead ? No. Those rivers of blood, 
that ocean of tears have not washed it out, nor 
will it die until God's word shall be accepted as 
truth that all men are of one blood, and the 
color of a man's skin neither gives character or 
value. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

As it is too early to write the history of the 
greatest RebelHon in the world's annals, while the 
roar of battle and garments rolled in blood are 
fresh in the memories of the combatants; the deep 
prejudices and burning hatred engendered by the 
strife would warp the author's mind to give his 
work the shape and color of his own preferences. 
It is to be hoped that these passions will be cooled, 
and memories of the past lost, before the next 
great conflict shall come. The recent war was 
sectional, and therefore a rebellion ; the next will 
be a civil war, in .the nomenclature of nations. A 
truthful and impartial history of the causes of the 
conduct and consequences of the war should be 
written before that event, as it might have some 
influence on the postponement of the crisis which 
will surely come sooner or later, unless the Lord 
interferes. Nothing more will be attempted here 
than an outline of the lawyer's observations and 
experiences while the war continued. After the 
presidential election of i860, and before Mr. 
Lincoln was inaugurated, South Carolina had be- 
gun to muster her military strength and openly 
prepare for war. Floyd, Secretary of War under 
Buchanan, had carefully transferred large quanti- 



132 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

ties of arms of all sorts and stores, the property of 
the nation, to Southern ports, towns, deHberately 
stealing them under cover of his office for the use 
of the rebels. When he had so done, to hold his 
office longer might result in his being exhibited 
to the world high, and at the end of a halter; so 
he tendered his resignation to Mr. Buchanan, say- 
ing he did not think it consistent zvith Ms honor 
to hold the position longer ; and he might have 
added, as there could not be more stealing done 
by him with safety. Mr. Buchanan tenderly ac- 
cepted the resignation, and by the time the grand 
jury of the District of Columbia had found several 
indictments against Floyd, that worthy type of 
Southern chivalry had transferred himself near to 
his spoils and beyond the jurisdiction. Mr. Jef- 
ferson Davis remained in the Senate during this 
time, and there can be no doubt was an aider and 
abettor in these criminal transactions. It is mor- 
ally certain that Davis, Floyd, Thompson, Cobb, 
and others, in the City of Washington, holding 
places of highest trust under the solemn sanctions 
of their official oaths, were the centre and nucleus 
of the Southern Confederacy, and every man of 
them should have been hanged as traitors. Why 
were they not? Not because the people or govern- 
ment was so merciful ; not because the best inter- 
est of the nation did not require it ; not because 
the enlightened judgment of mankind would not 
have approved it; but because scheming, ambi- 
tious,' selfish politicians, who divided and dis- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 33 

traded the councils of the nation to accomplish 
their own personal interests, shaped the policy of 
the gc^vernment to the end that the guilty parties 
might escape, and the innocent suffer. The his- 
tory of the world, from the creation, does not 
furnish a parallel to this Rebellion, and the man- 
ner in which it was treated by the government. 
It is not doubtful that there was intrinsic weak- 
ness in the government under the Constitution as 
it was before the war. The division of sovereignty 
between the Federal and State government was a 
solecism in fact as well as theory. There can 
be but one real sovereign over any people. Sub- 
ordinate powers may be delegated by a people to 
inferiors, but no division of the supreme power 
can be made which infringes the national control. 
This inherent weakness was very clearly discerned 
in the timid and cautious policy of that most ex- 
cellent man and patriot, Abraham Lincoln. 
Buchanan, upon the hypothesis of his loyalty, was 
afraid to move, and the first acts of Mr. Lincoln's 
administration should have struck the Rebellion 
fully in the front, while a watchful eye should 
have been kept keenly on the rear. As the 
government rested on popular opinion, the ad- 
ministration seemed to fear to go in advance of it. 
It was not until such sad and unnecessary sacri- 
fices of human Hfe and property as the fall of 
Southern forts and the tragedy of Bull Run that 
the millions of loyal people were awakened to the 
fact that the national life was threatened, and that 



134 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the authorities began to work in earnest. Mr_ 
Lincoln's private opinions had much to do with 
his pohcy. A native of Kentucky, his early im- 
pressions upon the subject of slavery had doubt- 
less taken form from his associations. Going into 
a free State, largely settled from Kentucky, his 
opinions were doubtless modified to the common 
sentiment of that people, that while opposed to 
slavery upon its own merits, yet it was legally 
guaranteed in the slave States, and as President 
he manifestly expected to accomplish the preser- 
vation of the Union and the conservatism of 
slavery in the slave States together. This grew 
out of fealty to the Constitution. This accounts 
for the appointment of McClellan to command the 
army of the Potomac with Fitz John Porter, Pat- 
terson and others, whose political opinions upon 
the subject of slavery were probably in harmony 
with those of the President, and whose failures in 
the war and their ultimate dishonor was the result 
of their politics rather than their disloyalty. The 
mountains of East Tennessee furnished neither 
soil nor climate for treason. Her children had 
been raised upon a higher plane than the swamp, 
lagoons and lands of the Southern coast. In im- 
agination (at least) they were nearer the sky and 
breathed purer air, physically and morally. The 
government had done East Tennessee no great 
favors in the gifts of money to cut a way for her 
commerce through the mountains which encircled 
her ; but the government had given her liberty to 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 35 

plow her ridges and dig her ores and eat her 
frugal fare in peace, build her log school-houses 
and her unpretending house of worship in which 
to serve the Lord, and there were none to molest 
or make her afraid. The very breath of treason 
was a stench in her nostrils, yet the fetid smell 
came faintly upon the air from that cesspool of 
conspiracy, South Carolina. 

The citizens of the town in which the lawyer 
lived met in the court-house, elected a chairman 
and secretary, appointed a committee to draft 
resolutions, and after some short addresses, 
adjourned, to meet again at a very early day. The 
lawyer, as chairman of the committee, drafted a 
series of resolutions strongly reprobating the course 
of, some of the Southern politicians, and standing 
squarely for the union against all comers. Two 
other members had prepared resolutions — '*one a 
little more mild in terms," the other full of fire 
and brimstone — against treason in general, and 
Charleston in particular. One of the resolutions 
of the series last mentioned declared it to be the 
duty of the government to send a fleet to Charleston 
and blow it into the sea. The resolutions unani- 
mously adopted were as strong as could properly be 
expressed in utter detestation of treason and traitors 
in the South. Not long after this meeting the 
author of the brimstone resolutions went to Wash- 
ington City, where he remained some time. His 
friends were utterly dumfounded on his return to 
hear him talk just as rabidly on the other side ; 



136 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

and soon after the war opened he became a candi- 
date for the Confederate Congress, was elected 
and served in that capacity; afterwards was cap^ 
tured by the Federal forces. This instance is 
stated to show the influences which were brought: 
to bear upon young aspiring men — -loyal at 
the opening of the war, but drawn into the Rebel- 
lion by the temptations to political distinction — but 
more especially to show that Washington was one 
of the headquarters of the Confederacy, where 
doubtless Mr. Jefferson Davis & Company in- 
veigled many into treason by flattery and promise 
of high promotion in civil and military life; in 
short, that Davis, Floyd, Cobb and others plotted 
treason under the nose of the government ; held 
their official stations and drew their pay, all the 
time gathering recruits to the conspiracy. In the 
face of such facts, and the long and bloody rebel- 
lion which they led, not one of them paid the 
penalty of his crime! And Davis now openly 
challenges the nation upon the righteousness of 
his course. And the great body of the secession 
element calling themselves Democrats laud him 
to the echo. Candid reader, what is that great 
power, called popular opinion, worth to any 
good end? The man who strikes your dog may 
be punished; but the man who murders half a 
million of men is a hero. Such facts as these 
prove the men who deny the existence of hell to 
be cranks, or of such vicious lives that they dread 
a long sojourn in that uncomfortable place, and al- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 3/ 

lay their fears, or try to, by denying its existence. 
The magnitude of the hero's crime outstrips the 
capacity of the common mind to measure its guilt. 
There is nothing very strange in this when human \ 
nature is understood. The devil is the greatest 
criminal in the universe, and yet nine-tenths of 
the human family follow him- blindly to their own 
destruction. Our grandfathers fought through a 
seven years* war to make this a great, free, happy 
nation. Their bodies have scarcely moldered in 
their dust before their sons are deluging thetr 
graves with each other's blood, because their 
fathers had left them too free. The thirst for 
blood was slackened by its flood ; and the ebb is 
going on, and another flood — yes, a deluge — will 
come, because the old wound covered over by 
quackery, with many other malignant causes, 
which are even now very near the surface of the 
body politic, will make the nation rock and reel 
from its center to its utmost borders. 

12 



138 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



\ 



CHAPTER XIX. 

The winter of 1860-61 in Washington passed in 
almost total inaction by the government, while the 
conspirators were actively employed there and in 
South Carolina maturing their plans and organiz- 
ing their military strength and keeping up corre- 
spondence in various ways with other slave States, 
seeking to secure co-operation in the first outbreak. 
Notwithstanding the earnest efforts which had 
been made by Calhoun and his followers, Pickens, 
Rhett, M'Duffie, Hayne$' and others for more than 
thirty years to educate the southern mind, to fire 
the Southern blood to rebellion, under the guise of 
''State Sovereignty," yet, when the crisis had 
been reached, there were baitings. No State but 
South Carolina seemed to be quite ready. There 
was pow-wowing upon the subject; and even in 
that hot-bed of secession. South Carolina, Judge 
McGrath, and perhaps others, would rather not be 
in too great a hurry. Indeed, it is almost certain 
that none of the slave States would have ventured 
upon the "sea of glory," which proved so far be- 
yond their depths, if South Carolina had not made 
the plunge. She is, therefore, entitled to all the 
glory, as, also, all the infamy, of daring to follow so 
closely in the path of the son of the morning in 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEX. 1 39 

his revolt in heaven, as is possible on this lower 
earth. 

Seeing the South could no longer rule the na- 
tion, as power was slipping from her hands, she 
was prepared to perpetrate the greatest wicked- 
ness in the history of man. It would be unjust to 
deny the governors of Georgia, Mississippi, Ala- 
bama, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee and Missouri 
the full merit of having been on the 6th of 
November, i860, fully pledged to secession, and 
in heart as vile traitors as Jefferson Davis, Esq. , him- 
self, and many hissing vipers of that breed were in 
their following in those States, as the event proved. 
Many of them held the opinion expressed by Sir 
John Falstaff, ''That the better part of valor is 
discretion," in the better part of which they saved 
their lives and kept out of the range of bullets 
and bombshells. On the 20th of December, i860, 
South Carolina passed her ordinance of secession. 
In January, 1861, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, 
Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas had passed simi- 
lar ordinances. The Legislature of Tennesseee, 
under the influence of Isham G. Harris and his 
parasites, had called a convention of the people to 
consider things as they were and should be. The 
question was submitted to the people, who decided 
by an overwhelming majority to have no conven- 
tion. Harris with his conspirators continued to 
plot, but made no headway until the attack upon 
Fort Sumter on the 12th of April, 1861. When 
the war was thus opened, those men who had ob- 



140 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

stinately refused to go into the secession move- 
ment, and who were led by the same John Bell 
who had been a candidate for the Presidency in 
the election of i860, and who had brought up the 
rear in that election, issued an address to the peo- 
ple of Tennessee. He and his followers arrayed 
themselves on the side of the Rebellion by endors- 
ing Harris's refusal to furnish troops at the call of 
the President, and to cover their design desired to 
remain neutral in the contest. Thus Bell and his 
party were lost to the Union cause. The Legis- 
lature then secretly authorized three commis- 
sioners to form a treaty with Jeff Davis & Co., 
and that king, as he was called, appointed the 
spread-eagle orator, Gustavus Henry Totten, and 
Wash Barrow, who sold out Tennessee to the 
rebels — ''lock, stock and barrel." These were all 
Bell-wethers and tinkled their bells, no doubt, 
at the said John's bidding. It was pretended that 
the State had seceded by the bargain and sale, be- 
cause the Legislature secretly passed an ordinance 
ratifying it, which was said to have been submitted 
to the people on the 8th day of June. This was 
the meanest fraud and the broadest farce that 
could have been practiced ; but it had the effect 
designed, to give some color to Harris's usurpation 
and reign of terror, which immediately followed. 
Harris sent his myrmidons over the State, but par- 
ticularly over East Tennessee, with authority to 
disarm the people. In the enforcement of this 
tyrannical order no union man was allowed to es- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I4I 

cape search and robbery. In the meantime the 
comparatively few secessionists in East Tennessee, 
emboldened by this high-handed usurpation, began 
to range through the counties, backed by a squad 
of so-called soldiers, calling upon the young men 
to organize and fight the Yankees. Knoxville 
soon became the rendezvous of traitors. The 
union men of East Tennessee having been kept from 
any organization for self-protection, partly from 
their isolated locality and partly by the indecision 
of the government at Washington, and the mani- 
fest halting of the Southern States in making the 
onslaught, but mainly by the secrecy of Harris's 
movements to throw Tennessee into the arms of 
the Southern Confederacy, were very soon like 
scattered sheep having no shepherd. There was 
a feeble effort at something like organization in the 
assemblage of a number of union men from differ- 
ent counties at Greenville. That convention was 
in session while the Confederacy was pushing men 
from Louisiana and other Southern States to join 
Beauregard's army in Virginia. The lawyer was 
in that convention, and saw the Louisiana tigers 
pass Greenville on the railroad, which had been 
surrendered to the rebels. The convention made 
a statement of the irregular and unlawful manner 
of hitching Tennessee to the Confederacy, and 
there were a few men for organized resistance, but 
the time had passed, and flight from the State was 
the only alternative. Horace Maynard, Andrew 
Johnson and Thomas A. R. Nelson were mem- 



142 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

bers of Congress. They started across the moun- 
• tains by separate routes. Maynard and Johnson 
crossed safely, but Nelson was captured, taken to 
Richmond, and was afterwards released upon his 
parole. After the adjournment of the Greenville 
convention the lawyer returned to his home, fully 
realizing the fact of the military subjugation of the 
State by the rebels. It was not long until a squad 
came to his home and demanded his guns. He 
had a rifle and shotgun. He knew resistance 
would be vain, and attempted to argue his own 
safety and that of his family required the posses- 
sion of at least one gun. All in vain were such 
protestations. The guns they must have, and 
were taken under protest. About the same time 
another squad went to old Mr. Caldwell's, who 
lived in a mountainous part of the same county, 
and demanded his guns. He refused to give 
y them up, and the miscreants shot him dead. 

The government had allowed the rebels to seize 
the Southern forts, arsenals and shipping in 
Southern ports, to bombard Fort Sumter, while 
Twiggs in Texas had traitorously turned over his 
whole charge — arms, stores, ammunition, all— to 
the Confederacy. The loyal men of Tennessee 
could not comprehend these things, and but for 
their stern determination never to submit to this 
attempt to destroy the government and fasten the 
yoke of slavery upon them, would at least have 
been submissionist. Not so. The fact was, the 
heart-throbs of East Tennessee were always, even 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 43 

in the darkest hours of the conflict, strong and 
constant for the union. By the apathy of the 
g-overnment and the sneaking practice of Harris 
and his Legislature, open resistance by any regu- 
lar organization had become impracticable. Yet 
there were military companies in several counties 
formed for local protection. One of these in Han- 
cock County was attacked, in which the old man 
Bird was wounded and his company was dispersed, 
leaving him on the battle ground. He crawled 
into a fallen tree-top, and was discovered by some 
rebels, who had volunteered to go upon this raid, 
dragged from his hiding-place, and being una- 
ble to stand on account of his wounds, was set up 
against a stump and shot to death for the amuse- 
ment of those patriotic volunteers in the cause of 
treason. The counties of Carter and Johnson 
were perhaps more compact for the union than 
any others in the State. One or more of such 
companies were formed in them after the murder 
•of old Bird in Hancock. The same volunteers 
(led by one Bynum, who was afterwards killed by 
as mean a rebel as himself), with others, marched 
from the town where the lawyer lived to wipe out 
these (Carter and Johnson Counties) scalawags. 
They had the smell of Bird's blood upon them and 
started upon a keen scent for more. The expedi- 
tion returned very shortly, but if they achieved 
any glory it was never heard of The failure to 
vindicate their rights on that occasion was said to 
be some controversy as to their rights inter se. 



\ 



144 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

At all events, they struck no blows that brought 
blood, except from noses, amongst themselves, 
and chicken roosts and pig pens. The only ma- 
terial acquisitions as far as known were a few bed- 
quilts, doubtless stripped from some poor woman's 
bed, used to cover her children. Those boys of 
the mountains would doubtless have given these 
patriots a hearty reception and furnished them 
with a variety of keepsakes in the shape of bullets 
and buckshot, and holes bored in many other 
places than those already in their ears, for the 
wearing of rings when their hair was parted in the 
middle. 

Before the fighting began, and while the slave 
States were being coaxed and cozened into the 
treason, the promise was that peaceable secession 
would be accomplished when all the slave States 
should have seceded ; after all passed ordinances of 
secession (except Kentucky and Maryland) the 
idea of reconstructing the union would not be tol- 
erated. Absolute separation and independence 
was the secession ultimatum. Cotton was king ; 
Europe must and would have it at any cost ; for- 
eign intervention would take place ; one Southern 
man could whip five Yankees, and such like stuff 
was swallowed by the ignorant gaping common 
people, until some of them thought the Union 
was gone and the Confederacy as good as estab- 
lished. These did not become rebels, but hope- 
less, and became more so by the fact that rebel 
cavalry in squads were scattered over the country, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 45 

pilfering robbing, murdering. The property of 
union men became lawful prize. Martial law was 
declared all over East Tennessee ; provost marshals 
and enrolling officers appointed in every county 
and town, composed, often, of the most incorrigi- 
ble rascals in the traitorous Confederacy. 

''West H. Humphreys!" What thoughts 
start at the sound of that name ! The future his- 
torian will give its synonym — a Federal judge 
for the district of East Tennessee doffing his office 
and assuming to hold the same place under the bogus 
Confederacy to escape the consequences of con- 
viction upon impeachment already made by the 
House of Representatives in Washington ! Sitting 
as a judge, under guard of rebel soldiers, upon the 
lives and property of men, the meanest of whom 
would have been disgraced by his companionship ! 
The name of Jeffries, the blackest type of judicial 
depravity, oppression and meanness in the history 
of the English courts, may furnish a comparison 
with this monstrous prostitution of judicial integ. 
rity. His edict sanctioned — 

The ruffians search the assassin's tread 
That filled the land with silent dread. 

The pen of the gifted (departed Nelson) shall 
epitomize the horrors of the drama. 

What hissing curse, or crushing blast, 
Shall be o'er perjured traitors cast ; 
Who sware their country to sustain, 
But gladly gave that country pain. 
Who can atone for all the bloods 
That deluge like an angry flood, 
13 



146 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

And fills the land with groans and tears 
That happiest stood among her peers ? 
The orphan child, the widowed wife. 
The soldier wounded, maimed for life ; 
The thousands who in lies believe, 
The millions in their hopes deceived ; 
The cheerless home, the ruins black, 
The fields thrown out to war's wild track; 
The very horses starved and thin, 
With ghosts of murdered men begin 
In bitterest strains to chant, rehearse 
The traitor's doom — the Tory's curse. 

An acquaintance said once he never knew the 
lawyer to be in a hurry. Observation and expe- 
rience had taught him ** to look before a leap" as 
eminently wise, and thereby he acquired the habit 
of not seeing danger until it was almost, if not alto- 
gether, over. To look to the end of any trouble 
is true wisdom ; to keep cool and let a kind Provi- 
dence in his circumstances shape his course and des- 
tiny, were both prudent and politic. The Supreme 
Court of Tennessee having failed to hold the Sep- 
tember term, 1861, at Knoxville, had appointed a 
special term in March, 1862. As the lawyer had 
business, he went at the appointed time ; found ev- 
erything in great confusion. General Casswell, who 
had been the clerk of the Supreme Court, was at the 
head of the militia — a clever gentleman in private 
life. Judge Robert J. McKi^nney was the only judge 
of the court present. The other judges did not at- 
tend, and f here was no' Supreme Court. The court- 
house was, however, the theatre of some sort of 
bogus judicial doings, but whether West Hum- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 47 

phreys or George Krown were administering the 
Confederate law is not stated. Each wore the 
''judicial ermine," and both lent their aid to the 
Confederate cause. An election was about to 
come on for members of the Confederate Con- 
gress. John Baxter was reputed to be against se- 
cession, but while in Knoxville the lawyer under- 
stood he thought of being a candidate for the Con- 
federate Congress upon the idea that in that posi- 
tion he could serve union men more efficiently than 
as a private citizen. Union men were very much in 
the condition of the fellow who was blown up in 
the circus. Having been thrown by an explosion 
into an adjoining lot and recovering himself, and 
not exactly comprehending the situation, said, 
''Well, what will they play next?" thinking prob- 
ably the incident was a part of the performance. 
Union men did not see exactly what figure they 
were to make in the political tumbling of laws and 
order, and the imagination ran far ahead of the 
judgment of many minds, as it often, indeed, does 
in the more ordinary conditions in human life. 



148 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XX. 

Returning from Knoxville, the town in which 
he Hved was crowded with excited throngs from 
various locahties upon a call for soldiers for the 
rebel armies. The church to which the lawyer 
belonged and was an elder (before the war), em- 
ployed a Presbyterian clergyman to minister to it. 
There this mustering of volunteers was going on 
in the town, and volunteers did not so freely mus- 
ter. This reverend gentleman took the street, 
harangued the crowd, urging young men to volun- 
teer in the cause of secession. The lawyer was 
not on the street at the time, but soon got the re- 
port of what his ''spiritual guide" had been do- 
ing. Indignant at such conduct, he encountered 
the preacher, and in terms less courtly than plain, 
told him what he thought of it. The preacher re- 
\ sented, stoutly charging the lawyer with being a 
"black Republican ;" to w^iich the lawyer replied in 
epithets whose significance fully represented the 
position of the reverend gentleman, and the two 
separated in mutual disgust. The warlike par- 
son did not long minister to that church after this 
'little episode. It may be truthfully remarked that 
ithe preachers of peace and good will toward men 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 49 

in the South are justly responsible for much of the 
evil which sprang out of the conflict. Many of 
them, and notably those of tlie Presbyterian Church, 
had aided in the attempt to educate the public 
mind to the belief that slavery was a divine insti- 
tution, slave-holding right, and the slave the prop- 
erty of his master, as his chattels or his money. 
The Presbyterian Church had been disrupted on 
this question, and the color-line distinctly drawn. 
Several years before the war, and when the war 
opened, the Presbyterian clergymen in East Ten- 
nessee were fully identified with this sentiment. 
It was strange to hear peace and pardon to all 
penitents who believed in Christ from the pulpit on 
the one hand, and for ministers out of the pulpit 
to be urging slaughter of their fellow-men. It is to 
be hoped they have obtained forgiveness. The 
wasted, wan skeletons walking or crouching in 
the mud and filth of Andersonville and Libby; 
the hungry, weeping widows and starving children, 
robbed of husbands, and fathers, and bread, are all 
within those chronicles which neither time nor 
chance can destroy. Let us hear what an eye- 
witness wrote of the clergy of East Tennessee, 
1863. 

"The clergy, whose proper business it is to de- 
clare on earth peace and good will toward men, 
with a {ew memorable exceptions, forgot their call- 
ing and clamored for war, when no man in the 
United States could truthfully say he had ever 
been oppressed by the government. After a few 



150 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

defeats, after thousands of widows and orphans 
had been made in the land, in a great measure 
through their influence over the pubhc mind, they 
began to walk softly before their Maker and to 
pray for peace. Let them now in good faith prac- 
tice the repentance which they preach to others." 
Religous frenzy has brought terrible suffering 
and prompted to the commission of awful crime 
in the visible church; and if the late Rebellion had 
involved a question of liberty of thought and opin- 
ion upon the subject of religion as to principle or 
practice, the course of the clergy would not have 
been so astonishing, but they preached that all 
men were made of one blood; that Jesus Christ 
died for all men ; that all who believe on him will 
be saved, and that all who believe are brethren, 
whether Jew or Gentile, bond or free. It could not, 
therefore, have been to sustain their religious con- 
viction, or defend their religious freedom, that they 
bellowed treason from their pulpits and practically 
made themselves accessory, before and after the 
fact, in the crimes committed by those who were 
deluded by their teachings and maddened by their 
exhortations. In May, 1861, the Rev. R. M. 
Palmer, of New Orleans, a distinguished Presby- 
terian and a D.D. in the Church, preached a ser- 
mon (which was published) entitled, ''Slavery a 
Divine Trust. " His first proposition was, "that 
such a trust became the pledge of divine protec- 
tion, and fidelity to it determines the fate by which 
it is overtaken." His second proposition was, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I5I 

' ' that slavery should be conserved and perpetuated 
(as then existing) with the full scope for its natural 
development and extension." His third proposi- 
tion was, *' Southern slaveholders were constituted 
guardians of the slaves." His fourth proposition 
was, ' ' that to conserve and perpetuate slavery was 
to defend the cause of God and religion. " " Who 
shall entice Ahab, King of Israel, that he may go 
up and fall at Ramoth Gilead? I will entice him, 
and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his proph- 
ets." That a lying spirit prompted this sermon 
does not admit of a doubt. There is one notable 
fact which must not be overlooked with a view to 
the animus of the secession clergy of the Presby- 
terian Church. In view of the terrible calamities 
resulting from the attempt to perpetuate slavery 
by the sword, and the utter overthrow and dis- 
comfiture of its champions in church and state, 
clearly showing the hand of a Divine Providence 
in the result, it would be expected that Christians 
who had been so active in the struggle on the 
wrong side, would have not only seen their 
error, but would have confessed it and sought rec- 
onciliation and peace with those of like religious 
faith. Has this been the case? Every candid 
mind will make its own inference. 

Just as the slave power before the war demanded 
for its own growth and strength the acquisition of 
Louisiana, the territories of the Creeks and Chero- 
kees, Texas and a part of Mexico, the repeal of 
the Missouri Compromise, so has the Southern 



152 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

Church ignored all attempts at fraternal relations 
with their Northern brethren for more than sixteen 
years since the close of the war, demanding con- 
cessions which could not be granted. Happily, a 
better spirit has been developed in this }'ear of 
grace, 1882, and while it wrongs none to speak 
the truth in regard to the past, as a warning and 
instruction to all who desire to learn, it is earnest- 
ly hoped that this is the beginning of an enlarged 
charity and enlightened Christianity for the glory 
of the Head of the Church and the temporal and 
eternal welfare of the members. It may be asked 
why the civil and spiritual commotion did not sub- 
side at the same time. The answer is, "The 
forces operating upon each were different. The 
civil outbreak was subdued by physical force ; the 
other can only be conquered by that moral force 
which the spirit of true Christianity exerts." . 

At the master of volunteers, before mentioned, 
in the town where the lawyer lived, a number of 
young men of slaveholding families, and sons of 
Democratic leaders in the county, were induced to 
enter the Confederate service, some of whom soon 
found bloody graves. Indeed, it soon became evi- 
dent that all able-bodied men under the age of forty- 
five years musi fight for the Confederacy or fly, 
and many went into the army as volunteers be- 
cause they feared conscription, who would not 
have served the rebel cause if they could have 
seen a way to have avoided it. The May term of 
the Chancery Court came on at the lawyer's town ; 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I 53 

martial law was enforced In the county, and a pro- 
vost marshal in the town. The honorable judge 
of the court had been required to take the oath of 
allegiance to the Confederate States, which he did 
under protest. When the court opened, the pro- 
vost marshal sent an order to the judge requiring 
all the lawyers at court to take the same oath. 
Several members of the bar were rabid rebels. 
The judge handed the order to one of those law- 
yers and the same was passed around un|il it 
reached the lawyer. No remark having been 
made by any one, the lawyer looked at it, handed 
it to some one else, rose from his seat, took his 
hat and walked out of the court-house. Shortly 
after two other lawyers loyal to the United States 
came to him in the street, and in a few minutes 
the court adjourned (5///^ <^/r). Hon. John Neth- 
erland and Hon. A. A. Kyle were those lawyers. 
They soon crossed the mountains into Kentucky, 
where many union men had already gone, leaving 
their wives and children to join military companies 
to fight their way back under the stars and stripes. 
The lawyer was in doubt as to what to do with 
himself. If he remained at home he must live 
with his life in his hand, ready to be delivered at 
any moment. To leave home would be to aban- 
don his feeble wife and young daughters to the 
mercy of a reckless soldiery and scarcely less reck- 
less roughs around them. He had not a kinsman 
within a hundred miles. He was in his fifty-fourth 
year, was not subject to conscription as the law 



154 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

then stood. He was not afraid to leave his slaves, 
for he was sure they would not injure his wife 
and children, and if they ran off it would only an- 
ticipate their liberation, for he had said in the can- 
vass of i860 the first gun fired against the union 
upon this question would be the death-knell of 
slavery. While in this state of mind, the high 
sheriff of the county came to his house. He was 
a brave and whole-souled union man. He had os- 
tensibly started to what he gave out as an execu- 
tion sale, to take place beyond the mountains to- 
ward Kentucky, but in fact was on 'his way to that 
State to join the Federal army. He was a special 
friend of the lawyer's. They surveyed the whole 
subject. It was known to be a very laborious jour- 
ney across the mountains to be made mainly in the 
night and on foot — the distance over one hundred 
miles to a point of safety. It was finally concluded 
the lawyer had better not go. To have gotten 
into the army would not have been more danger- 
ous than to stay at home, and active military em- 
ployment was far better than the lingering suspense 
and anxiety which he must suffer surrounded by 
enemies and uncertain when to be relieved. The 
sheriff thought the lawyer could not bear the 
fatigue of such a trip, and it was finally determined 
the lawyer should stand his ground and face the 
result. The sheriff departed to join others on the 
route, and had a rough journey and narrow escape, 
but at last got through, joined the army, became 
captain of a company, was captured afterwards 



THREESCORE YEARS AN'D TEN. 1 55 

and shut up in Andersonville (that still running 
ulcer upon the Confederate name), and though af- 
terwards exchanged suffered terribly in that loath- 
some place, unfit for swine. He still lives, and 
his name is Elias Beal. 



156 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



\ 



CHAPTER XXL 

The surest way to avert danger is to look it full 
in the face — meet it squarely and boldly. There 
is a mesmeric power in the eye that never falters 
and the cheek that never blanches. Physical 
courage is insensibility, and has no moral charac- 
ter; true courage comprehends the danger and ac- 
cepts its challenge. Cowardice itself may imitate 
bravery when placed in circumstances where to 
fight is a necessity. This was very much the situa- 
tion of the lawyer from May, 1862, to near the 
close of the war. As every able-bodied man un- 
der the age of forty-five was required to go into 
the rebel army, the union men who had remained 
at home up to this time began to drop out of sight. 
Pilots, as they were called, who had crossed the 
mountains in Kentucky, returned to take their 
Union friends out, and there was soon constructed 
in this manner what was called the underground 
''railroad" and the grapevine telegraph. Most 
of their expeditions were successful ; a few Avere 
disastrous. A sad case was that of the two young 
men, John and Hugh Rupel, sons of Elijah Rupel, 
an aged Christian man, whose two sons were the 
mainstay of his industrious and Christian family. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 15/ 

These young men were remarkable for their mod- 
esty, gentleness and purity of character; were 
highly esteemed by all who knew them. Finding 
they must go into the Rebel army, or escape to 
Kentucky, they left their aged parents to the care 
of divine Providence, and started to cross the 
mountains. Reaching Clinch River they were ar- 
rested by Rebel scouts, and were both killed. 

The lawyer visited the bereaved family. Sad 
was their condition, and deep their sorrow. The 
two courageous daughters procured a horse, and 
traveled to the place where their brothers were 
murdered, something under a hundred miles, and 
had them decently buried. The family lived on 
the bend of a very high ridge, their woodland al- 
most inaccessible. That old man in the deep 
snows of winter toiled up that rugged hill, and 
with feeble hands rolled wood from its sides to 
kindle their winter fires, for help could not be ob- 
tained in all East Tennessee. This underground 
railroad and grapevine telegraph was kept at work 
until the Union men, subject to the conscription, 
were well gleaned out. 

Another catastrophe occurred, the wounding 
and subsequent death of Capt. James Lane by 
Rebel scouts in crossing the Cumberland Moun- 
tains, the bold and successful pilot who had con- 
ducted many beyond the Rebel lines. Many lives, 
doubtless, were lost in those mountains whose \ 
names will never be registered in the book of time. ^ 
Such scenes were being enacted in the mountains, 



158 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

and a Presbyterian clergymen in Knoxville im. 
plored the Almighty from his pulpit that the 
bones ot these refugees might bleach on those 
mountains. Very soon the Union men of the law- 
yer's town were nearly all gone. Guerilla bands, 
claiming to belong to the Rebel army, were en- 
gaged generally in the plunder of the property 
of Union families. One of these bands was com- 
manded by one William Owens. His company 
was a band of cut-throats marauding around 
seeking to shed blood. They found a lad of some 
sixteen years whose name was^l-izemore. His 
father was a Union man, and quite aged. This 
gang of desperadoes arrested the old man, took 
the boy into the woods, and deliberately mur- 
dered him. What became of the old man is not 
certainly known. He had another son called 
William, who had been regarded as rather inclined 
to the support of the Rebel cause, but on the bru- 
tal murder of this young brother he rushed to 
the support of the Union men, and took terrible 
revenge. Whether the Confederate commander 
in East Tennessee commissioned Owens to plun- 
der and kill in order to subdue the loyal sentiment 
of that section, as Reynolds and others were trying 
to do in other counties, is not stated. One fact is 
known viz: that Owens was recognized by the 
Rebel military as a captain, and the inference is 
fair that as his operations were confined to two or 
three counties, his business was to suppress Un- 
ionism in these counties. Loyal men were not 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I 59 

allowed to kill "copperheads" in the North and 
West, though they were doing the national cause 
more injury than the old and unarmed Union men 
and boys in the Rebel States could possibly do to i 
injure the Rebel cause. And this fact is a fair \ 
index to the temper of the two belligerents and 
sections. The one was governed by the spirit of 
humanity, using no force beyond what was neces- 
sary to the preservation of the integrity of the 
nation. The other, in the spirit of demoniac am- 
bition to rule them, in defiance of justice, human- 
ity and the intelligent sense of all enlightened and 
Christian nations upon the earth, drew the sword, 
threw away the scabbard, reddened the hearthstones 
of their brothers' homes with the blood of their 
children, or took away their bread, and left them 
to starve or live upon roots and herbage — dragged 
old men from their homes, drove them before them 
like cattle through rain, mud and snow, kept them 
in sheds or barns, empty of straw or hay, or in 
outhouses, without bed, blanket, fire or food. It 
was not uncommon for men and boys who did not 
pretend to belong to the Rebel army to go along 
with these squads of bandits, acting as guides to 
houses or hiding places of Union men ; as fierce 
in their pursuits and arrests as the guerillas them, 
selves. 

It was a gala time to cowardly wretches who were \ 
malignant toward their neighbors. Too dastardly 
to assail them upon equal terms now that they had 
professional cut-throats to do their fighting, they 



l60 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

took great delight in setting on the "bloodhounds," 
but most generally kept back in the bushes, so 
that if they were ever called to account they might 
aver their innocence. These outrages were not 
confined to the more populous portions of the 
counties, but were often perpetrated in the hills 
and hollows, and usually upon men reputable at 
home, but bold enough to confess their loyalty. 
Indeed, it was a rare thing to find a man who had 
a bad character before the war advocating the 
Union cause. It is true some well meanincf men 
were disunionists in sentiment, but they had been 
educated to think slavery right, and had now fallen 
into bad company. Civil war always develops the 
worst characters, and more fully uncovers the hy- 
pocrites. There is a class of human character fair 
to the seeming, but black as the shadow of the earth 
when revealed. These were the times to try the 
man. If a man had in him some remnant of the 
nature which the Creator gave to his great-grand- 
father, it would at least glimmer in his acts, but if 
the moral image were utterly defaced, the deface- 
ment would be apparent. This last class of per- 
sons then seemed to be ubiquitous. The families 
of those men who had gone to Kentucky were 
subjected to great hardships. Many women, poor 
before the war, making a scanty living with the aid 
of their husbands, were now left to eke out a bare 
subsistence with the hoe, for horses the Rebels 
would not allow them to keep, and when after a 
whole summer's toil the woman and her little ones 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. l6l 

had cultivated a small patch of. corn, potatoes, 
cabbage or beans, some Rebel squad would come 
along and plunder it. 

But the meanest character the war brought forth 
was the cunning sneak who was a full-blown Rebel 
with Rebels, and just as loyal as the best with 
Union men. One such the lawyer happened to 
know, and it is gratifying that the class was small. 
This fellow was so sharp as to be trusted by both 
sides. A relative starting to Kentucky left his 
wife and children on his little farm until the hus- ^ 
band should return with the Federal army, in the 
care of this professed loyal Rebel, who promised 
to attend to their wants. When the absent hus- 
band and father returned, he learned from his wife 
that this unworthy *' trustee" had been most 
active in robbing her, and by his knavery and 
trickery at the close of the war had accumulated 
means enough to buy a farm, when, as before the 
war, he was not, in common parlance, worth a 
''Chincapin." But like all men of his class and 
character he soon disappeared from the theater 
of his operation. 

A demoniac spirit, revolting to humanity, seemed 
to have taken possession of many Rebel families. 
Standing on the street the lawyer saw a boy of one 
of the near neighbors riding up, holding the end 
of a rope in his hand, while the other end was tied 
around the neck of one James Walker, a man 
over fifty years of age, of good character and prop- 
erty. This young cut-throat was leading this old 
14 



1 62 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

man, haltered by the neck, walking or trotting on 
foot behind the boy's horse. The old man's oL 
fense was his loyalty to the Union. This boy led 
the old man through the main street of the town 
and out of it some miles. This young outgrowth 
of the Rebellion belonged to the guerilla band 
headed by Owens. There were disloyal men in 
town who did not approve of such barbarity, but 
they were powerless against this band of desper 
adoes, and, therefore, could only express regrets 
among themselves. For more than two years the 
lawyer was almost literally penned up in the town, 
and mainly at his own home, threatened almost 
every day — soldiers riding by taunting him, boys 
throwing stones into his yard, bullets fired into his 
house through his transoms, ruffians stopping be- 
fore his door, and hurrahing for Jeff. Davis and 
the Southern Confederacy by way of insult to 
himself and family. Squads of hungry soldiers, 
demanding food, and getting none, poured anathe- 
mas upon his head. The lawyer had ample oppor- 
.tunity to cultivate mental discipline and reliance 
•upon that Providence which he believed would 
keep him more safely than he could keep himself 
Acting upon his well settled conviction that a 
craven spirit will provoke contempt and oppression 
he resolved never to let a single Rebel or a thou- 
sand make him falter. And this, under Provi- 
idence, was his safety. This was courage upon 
.compulsion. 

.But. the lawyer had some accidental advantages. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 63 

He lived very near the Female Institute, the prin- 
cipal of which was a true type of that class of men 
who are all things to all men, a highly cultivated 
gentleman, of benevolent heart. As the institu- 
tion was at that time patronized mainly by Rebels 
he was regarded as Southern in sentiment. Before 
the war the College had been under the control 
of a Board of Curators, of which the lawyer was 
Chairman at the opening of the war. Now the 
principal was in charge upon his own account by 
an arrangement with the Board. These circum- 
stances brought the lawyer and the principal to be 
friendly and familiar. Fascinating and persuasive 
in conversation and manners, desiring to prevent 
personal strife and private injury, he was very 
active in interposing his good offices when Union 
men or their property were threatened, and, doubt- 
less, saved many from serious damage. It was 
remarkable that though Southern in sentiment, he 
did not seem to apprehend any great danger to 
himself or others when the Federal forces were 
about. The reader who lived in that locality will 
readily recognize Dr. Todd. It is not certain 
whether he was a relation of that ''broken-hearted 
widow" of the lamented ''President Lincoln." A 
few influential and worthy men in the town were 
warm personal friends of the lawyer, though 
strongly favoring the success of the Rebellion. 
The policy of the Rebel government was to crush 
out the Union sentiment in the South, and as there 
was more of it in East Tennessee than in other 



\ 



164 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

sections which had been wheedled into the Con- 
federacy, Union men in that loyal region were pe- 
culiarly obnoxious. About this time there were 
not more than half a dozen Union men of any 
prominence in the town and neighborhood where 
the lawyer lived, but this number was too large to 
suit the aforesaid policy. 

A Rebel officer, with a squad, came into the 
town, and arrested a worthy man who had a large 
and dependent family, and who had a brother in 
the Rebel army, but whose family connection was 
mainly loyal. They arrested also another man, 
more wealthy and prominent, and took the two 
under guard all the way to the city of Richmond, 
the seat of the beast. A Rebel brother Mason 
warned the lawyer of the coming of the Rebel 
command that he might avoid capture. Very 
shortly a Virginia Major came to the town to pro- 
cure the lawyer's attendance on that center spot of 
Confederate authority. The Major happened to 
go to the house of an old Rebel friend of the law- 
yer's, and communicated his purpose. That friend 
of thirty years prevailed upon the Major to turn 
his attention to something else, and thus through 
the influence of one of the most disloyal men of 
the town the lawyer Was^ rescued, for that time, 
from arrest. Such loyal men as were still sprinkled 
over the country (a very few in any neighborhood) 
kept faith with each other, and it became as re- 
freshing to meet one of tliem- as a near absent 
friend. 



THREESCX)RE YEARS AND TEN. 1 65 

The "grapevine" telegraph from time to time 
brought tidings of preparations to rescue East 
Tennessee. And while the stamp of " steed " and 
*' boom of cannon " were anxiously expected, and 
hope of relief often deferred, the Rebels plied 
their vocation of harassing Union families, old 
men and women. Arrests were very common 
even by citizens not soldiers. News was brought 
of the arrest of Haygood by two Presbyterians in 
the upper part of the county, Thomas N. Price by 
a merchant, and others. Then that George W. 
Moore had killed a Mr. Brown ; that Rev. E. E. 
Gillenwaters, afterwards Judge Gillenwaters, had 
been arrested and imprisoned by Rebel citizens; 
Benjamin Ross by Monehun and other citizens ; 
then Ben Rodgers by Larkins and other citizens ; 
John O'Donald, a near neighbor of the lawyer, 
by order of the Provost Marshal without special 
charges ; then Miller by Moor and others ; then 
Patrick O'Conner by Levissey and others; then 
Jolly by Watkins and others; then Peter Jones by 
Cantrell and others ; then Preston Heck by Simp- 
son and others; then James McGinnes by Hipshen 
and others; then Solomon ^izemore by Anderson 
and others; Ed McGinnes by McCoy and others; 
then Ward by Phipps and others; Dr. John W. 
Mapis by Burem and others; Jones by Ball and 
others; then Joseph Tucker by Long and others. 
The particulars of these several cases would make 
a volume. Conscript officers were ranging in 
search of recruits for the overthrow of the Gov- 



\ 



l66 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN 

ernment. One of these so intensely set upon the 
ruin of the Union, as it was, seemed willing to 
recognize Isham G. Harris as king, and to press 
into the service of the king every boy in the land 
who was able to carry a gun. He pressed a boy 
not subject to conscription, as it was alleged, by 
the name of Light, who was soon afterwards killed. 
The father brought suit after the war closed, but 
Johnson's policy of reconstruction restored power 
to the Rebels in Tennessee, whose new Supreme 
Court set its broad foot upon war damages, as was 
to ?iave been expected from particeps aiininiSy and 
the suit was finally abated. Because of the sys- 
tematic persecution by guerillas and citizens as 
well, saltpeter caves and hiding-places were sought 
by Union men who, thus concealed, with bated 
breath listened for the bloodhounds in human 
shape, and hoped for the coming of the stars and 
stripes. The number of Union men in the law- 
yer's town was reduced to three. 

In the meantime the Union element in the 
churches had been scattered, and the Old and New 
School congregations had been depleted until but 
a handful could be gathered from the debris of 
both. These remnants had agglomerated in the 
church building in which the lawyer was an elder, 
but under a new regime. The recruiting preacher 
had gone to other parts. Adhesion to the South- 
ern Confederacy was a practical condition of rec- 
ognition in this new birth under the old death. 
The lawyer was no longer at home in that former 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 6/ 

sanctuary which was now more of the character of 
a poHtical meeting-house. A man of fair Hterary 
attainments was employed, by whom the lawyer 
did not learn to dispense Southern Confederacy 
theology to that brother-loving body of professors. 
Old-fashioned Christianity was at a discount in the 
town, as it generally was in the South. 



l68 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

The lawyer went, on a certain Sabbath, to hear 
the gospel, or so much of it as should be preached 
by the new man in his old church. Whether the 
lawyer's presence prompted the preacher on that 
occasion, or whether his political ** tea-kettle" 
boiled over by inadvertence, is not stated. But 
an idea may be gathered of the character of his 
speech by the following quotations from it : * 'That 
old running sore on the body politic, fetid with 
every foul stench, Horace Greeley." "Of course, 
Roberson had a salutary fear of 'bluejackets,' and 
when they came along split the wind in a hasty 
flight down into the depth of Dixie, and how much 
lower is not known. " 

As the war progressed with alternate victory and 
defeat, with the sacrifice of thousands of precious 
lives, all men began to realize it was a life and 
death struggle. And while the lawyer felt assured 
the Rebellion would be crushed, and slavery swept 
from the land, yet the time it might take to accom- 
plish it could not be clearly foreseen. All pro- 
fessional business suspended, food and raiment 
becoming scarce, collection of debts impracticable, 
except in Confederate paper, in which he would 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 69 

not deal, he began to meditate escape into the 
Federal lines, but not without taking his family 
along. 

He applied to a member of the Confederate Con- 
gress from his district to aid him in getting a pass- 
port for himself and family across the military 
lines. Accordingly the Congressman wrote to 
General Buckner, then in command at Knoxvillc, 
recommending the grant, and stating that the law- 
yer would be of no use to the Confederacy. Gen- 
eral Buckner replied, promising the passport at a 
future day, if no public interest should forbid it. 
With a view to such exodus the lawyer wrote to a 
former banker at Knoxville to procure funds which 
should be recognized as having any value beyond 
the Confederate Unes. He received the following 

answer : 

"Knoxville, Tenn., Oct. i, 1862. 

"Dear Sir: 

"Your favor of the 31st ult. received. I have 
received neither bank notes nor coin for sale. You 
can buy coin in Virginia at one hundred and forty 
premium; that is, ^2.40 for ;^i.oo (two dollars and 
forty cents for one dollar). Bank notes also can 
be had there at from fifteen to twenty cents pre- 
mium. Your obedient servant, 

"S. Morrow." 

Thus Confederate paper at Richmond, on the 
1st of October, 1862, was at a discount of one 
hundred and forty per cent. The bank notes re- 
ferred to were notes of the banks of seceded 
15 



170 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

States, and the discount referred to their value 
compared with Confederate paper. But Confed- 
erate paper soon became so plentiful and cheap 
that ''bank notes" were hid away. In the finan- 
cial flood in the end bank notes were a little better 
than Confederate promises. The lawyer has sev- 
eral bank bills, and the only evidence they furnish 
is of banks that were, but are not. Kentucky, the 
native State of the lawyer, was to be his refuge, 
and to assure himself that in escaping Scylla he 
would not plunge into Charybdis, he wrote to 
Kentucky for information of the attitude of the 
State toward the Confederacy, and received the 
following answer : 

* 'Clerk's Office of Court of Appeals, } 
Frankfort, Kentucky. j 
** Dear Sir : 

*' Yours of the i6th was received. Kentucky 
is in the Union, and there she will remain, immov- 
able by sensational dispatches or camp lies. We 
shall take care of John C. Breckinridge and his co. 
conspirators. Respectfully, etc., 

" Leslie Combs, Clerk." 

I had relied on Tennessee, but she went off in 
a panic for the snake concern. It is painful to 
witness the hypocrisy patent upon the surface of 
the public utterances of secession leaders as to 
their designs. General Combs refers to J. C. 
Breckinridge in the above letter as being "taken 
care of ' ' 

When Breckinridge and Lane were nominated 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I/I 

at Baltimore, both, being at Washington, were ser- 
enaded, and made speeches. Breckinridge said : 
''I understand that apprehensions are entertained 
in highly respectable quarters that the National 
Democratic party is a party of disunion men, and 
intends to break up the union of States [cries of 
never, never, we intend to preserve it]. I can not 
bring myself but to think that their fears are ut- 
terly groundless. Allow me to add a word in re- 
gard to myself. When that convention selected 
me as one of the candidates, looking at my hum- 
ble antecedents, and the place of my habitation, 
it gave to the country, as far as I was concerned, 
a personal and geographical gurantee that its inter- 
ests were in the Union." 

Lane said : ' ' Let no man ever say that the party 
that placed in nomination that gallant and gifted 
young Kentuckian, John C. Breckinridge, and as- 
sociated my name on the ticket, that there was one 
drop of disunionism in the nomination, for no man 
would go farther to preserve this Union than I 
would [applause]. None would go farther than* 
John C. Breckinridge" [renewed applause]. 

Does any one imagine Jeff. Davis and Breckin- 
ridge did not understand each other, both in the 
Senate, and, doubtless, in full accord in purpose 
in the Baltimore Gonvention, which was manipur 
lated by traitors? Howbeit, some of its greene- 
members might not have been fully in its secrets. 

General Combs bore his full share in taking care 
of Kentucky, and the gallant and gifted young 



1/2 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

Kentuckian, John C. Breckinridge, found, much 
to his mortification, doubtless, that Kentucky did 
understand her interest, and her duty as well, to 
be in the Union, and in spite of the uttermost ef- 
forts of Vice-President Breckinridge, Governor 
McGuffin, Morehead and Buckner and that ilk, 
who could not move her to break the faith of the 
fathers, whose motto was : " Esto perpetual The 
dark and bloody ground, its ancient appellative, 
famous for hemp — a useful article — had no fame 
for treason, and did not desire to acquire any. It 
is indigenous to all natural soils to produce weeds, 
but a clear distinction in the species and quality 
must be made. Some are not poisonous ; others 
are deadly nightshades or "Upas" under which 
nothing lives. The latest and most destructive 
of intellectual weeds grown on Kentucky soil 
were soon transplanted to more Southern lati- 
tudes, where their peculiar views could be kept in 
more active circulation. 

The Supreme Court before the war sat at Knox- 
ville. In September, 1862, the lawyer received 
the following letter from one of the judges, a per- 
sonal friend of many years : 

''Knoxville, Aug. 28, 1862. 
** Dear Sir : 

"I take it for granted that we shall have no 
court next month ; such seems to be the general 
impression of the bar. I do not look for either 
of the judges from the West. Judge Cooper has 
gone to Europe, as I am informed, and Judge 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1/3 

Wright is said to be with the army in Mississippi ; 
perhaps so. As for myself no commission has 
been sent to me, and I have made no apphcation for 
one, supposing the election returns were not com- 
plete, and in the existing state of things not re- 
garding a commission of much consequence. 

"I regret that you think of moving from East 
Tennessee, and yet I do not much wonder at it. 
I fear that at the close of this revolution, whenever 
that may be, or whatever may be the result, our 
social condition will be such that a residence here 
will scarcely be desirable, if even tolerable. I 
would myself be glad to find a hiding place some- 
where until these calamities be overpast. If you 
should finally conclude to emigrate to Missouri it 
will afford me pleasure to furnish such a testimonial 
as is suggested in your letter. 

''Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

*'R. J. McKlNNEV." 

The reader will determine for himself how much 
respect Judge McKinney had for secession. He 
had large pecuniary interests to be guarded, and a 
conservative course in that respect was prudent. 
It was greatly to be regretted that Judge Wright 
was drawn into the active support of the Rebel- 
lion. He was greatly esteemed by the bar of East 
Tennessee. ' ' Cooper, ' ' that name suggests the idea 
of a barrel, but in the case of His Honor, the 
Judge, proof is furnished that the name often does 
not furnish the slightest idea of the thing which it 



1/4 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

purports to represent. The Judge by no stretch 
of the imagination could be likened to a barrel, 
unless it should be the barrel of a ''pocket pistol." 
He has been called a Kansas grasshopper. How 
the sobriquet was given him may be imagined, at 
least, from the hop he made from America to Eu- 
rope when the war commenced. He was a Demo- 
crat before the war, and since this leap across the 
Atlantic meant something, was he in the search of 
his genealogy to trace his ancestry to some noble 
house a little below the royalty, so that when the 
Confederacy should be established {proteinp07^e)y 
soon to go into an empire, he might claim prestige 
of birth and blood, or did he go from Jeff, as Dor- 
mant's commissioner adjunct to Mason and Slidell 
or otherwise? Of course, he did not go to aid 
Blackburn, of Kentucky. From his appearance 
one would not judge him to be a man of war, but 
Walter Scott said Sir Geoffrey Hudson was war- 
like though the Duke of Buckingham proposed 
with the jerk of his thumb to kick him from 
Dover to Calais across the British Channel. If the 
Judge had remained in Dixie he might have been 
the peer of General Mahone. The reason of his 
going is at best conjectural. It is most just to 
suppose he went upon his private business, just 
as it happened when the great "State Debt 
Case" went into the Supreme Court of Tennessee 
at Nashville recently, his honor having received 
an addition to the ''Cooper" of LL. D., and being 
the only acknowledged Doctor of Laws on the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 75 

Supreme Bench, was prevented from sitting in 
judgment in that important case by his private 
business. He had obtained some State bonds. 
How lucky sometimes to have a plausible excuse. 



176 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

As the war progressed the Rebels found that 
they had undertaken a big job. The attempt to 
overthrow free government and estabHsh slavery 
by force of arms could not succeed in the nine- 
teenth century. The conflict between sectional 
and personal pride and conscious weakness began 
to be apparent. The desperate efforts to fill up 
the constantly thinning ranks of their armies were 
marked by little intolerance toward any who 
dared to avow loyalty to the stars and stripes. 
Many acts of cruelty and crime will not be revealed 
to the world at large, but are carefully registered 
m that record of the deeds done in the body. 

To be aroused at midnight by Rebel soldiers in 
search of plunder, horses, meat, flour, corn, or 
anything they could use, even to whisky; to be 
threatened and vilified as a Lincolnite and traitor 
to the South, was the lawyer's experience almost 
daily. Through the winters, springs and summers 
of 1862-63 he had waited for the passport which 
never came. A Avidowed mother and a sickly son 
desired to go beyond the Rebel lines. The young 
man had hemorrhage of the lungs. The lawyer 
was applied to foi advice. He wrote to John 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 7/ 

Baxter upon the subject, and received the follow- 
ing letter. 

Knoxville, Tenn., August 21, 1863. 
Dear Sir: 

Your favor with enclosures from Mr. Crawford 
came to hand this morning; I handed the same to 
Major Martin, Adjutant General to General Buck- 
ner, and requested a passport for Mr. Crawford 
and his mother. He replied that General Bragg's 
department had been recently extended all over 
East Tennessee, and that application would have 
to be made to him. General Bragg is at or near 
Chattanooga. I have no idea that he will grant 
one, but if Mr. Crawford desires it I will send the 
same forward to him. Let me know if he wishes 
me to do this. I will make no charge for the 
matter. A good deal of excitement and a great 
many rumors in town. It is believed that Rose- 
crans and Burnside are both advancing on East 
Tennessee. In this condition of things it is diffi- 
cult to get the military to give much attention to 
outsiders. Very respectfully, 

John Baxter. 

This letter was grateful to the mother and son ; 
also to the lawyer, for he knew the writer was 
posted, and the coming of Burnside was no fic- 
tion. The news made the poor, persecuted, almost 
broken-spirited Union people feel so jubilant and 
valiant they were ready to cry havoc and let slip 
the ''does of war." The raids of Federal cavalry 



'tj- 



178 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

into East Tennessee from time to time had mo- 
mentarily thrilled the heart of her Union people 
only to drop into a deeper despondency, which in- 
dicated the want of force to give permanent relief; 
but now, Burnside w^as coming to stay, and he 
did come, and he did stay. East Tennessee from 
that time became the theatre of not merely con- 
scription, depredation, plunder and murder, but act- 
ual war. Though Buckner made haste not to allow 
Burnside to capture him, and Rosecrans had ob- 
tained a position at Chattanooga very uncomforta- 
ble to both Buckner and Bragg, yet the country 
above Knoxville was still infested with guerillas, 
fractions of regiments and companies scattered 
over the counties so as to make the Rebel soldier 
sometimes appear ubiquitous. The country between 
Knoxville and Chattanooga having been pretty 
well rifled of Rebel military, and the railroads in 
the hands of the Federal forces, General Burnside 
turned his attention to upper East Tennessee. 
Suddenly and unexpectedly the Second Tennessee 
Infantry (mounted) dashed into the lawyer's town, 
run off or captured the few Rebel soldiers who were 
loafing about; surrounding the house of the Con- 
federate Congressman, who happened to be at 
home, took him prisoner, as also another promi- 
nent Rebel, who had been a United States Indian 
Asfent, and took them off to Knoxville. This 
Indian agent and Congressman were friends of 
the lawyer's, and, though he greatly disapproved 
.their .course as Rebels, he felt concerned for these 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 79 

men. Dr. Todd, ever ready to help in benevo- 
lent work, informed the lawyer of the capture of 
the two men, and proposed to go after the com- 
mand and intercede for them if the lawyer would 
go along. Thereupon they procured horses and 
followed the command four miles to the crossing 
of the Holston, but did not reach it until the last 
company was fording the river. They were in- 
formed that the prisoners were so far ahead that 
they could not overtake them. Turning back to- 
wards town, they were met by a battalion of Rebel 
cavalry. This placed the lawyer in a critical posi- 
tion — known to be a Union man, coming from the 
river where the Federal forces had just left, the 
point was clear that he had been with them and 
aiding in their work. He expected to be arrested 
on the spot, but he kept cool and rode along with 
the crowd, as they could not pursue any further. 
He reached home, ate his supper and waited 
events. Shortly there was a call at the gate. The 
lawyer went out and met at the gate the notorious 
* * Bill Owens ' ' and a soldier on horseback. Owens 
said, **You are under arrest," and turning to the 
soldier said, ''Take him to headquarters." One 
of his daughters brought out his hat, not knowing 
what was to be done. The lawyer was told to 
march over to the court-house, and he took up 
the line of march, while the soldier, his gun across 
his saddle, rode behind in the most approved 
style of a cattle driver. Reaching the court-house 
he was driven into a hollow square formed by the 



l80 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

troops. This seemed to be an impromptu prison. 
The lawyer did not say a word, but stood for a 
half hour in this pen, the soldiers saying nothing 
to him. He knew nothmg of what was going on 
outside, but learned afterwards that Dr. Todd and 
the old friend who had saved him from arrest by 
the Virginia major had appealed to the command 
to release him, Dr. Todd stating the facts of the 
following of the Federal regiment and the old 
friend protesting that it would not do to carry the 
lawyer off. So, after such imprisonment for a 
limited time, the guard ordered his release. He im- 
mediately returned to his home to relieve his helpless 
family of the trouble and grief of his arrest. The 
mother and daughters who read this story can un- 
derstand the reaction in the hearts of his wife and 
daughters better than they can be described by 
any word-painting of the same. 

From that time on to the end of the war this 
town, as well as upper counties of East Tennessee, 
became Contested grounds, the Rebel forces com- 
ing in and the Federal forces driving them out, 
and the Rebels returning after the Federals had 
diminished their forces and driving them out ; so 
that system of advancing and falling back alter- 
nately between them kept both sides on the alert 
and the non-combatants in constant dread — Union 
people afraid of the Rebels and Rebel sympathizers 
afraid of the Yankees. The more active their mil- 
itary movements, the more intense became the ex- 
citement of citizens and more bitter the persecu- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. l8l 

tions of the defenseless. Rebels under lead of a 
a desperate bandit called Reynolds perpetrated 
terrible crimes upon Union men and families, and 
Owens spread terror wherever he went. On the 
other hand, William B.,;^izemore, in command of 
a Federal scout, dashed into the lawyer's town, 
where some Rebel soldiers were quartered, and 
killed every man of them, so that their dead bodies 
were left lying on the sidewalks and in houses 
where some of them took refuge. Dashing around 
town^izemore met the miscreant who had led old 
man Walker through the streets with a halter 
around his neck, and instantly killed him, and left 
him lying on the side of the road, taking his horse, 
^^.izemore took a terrible revenge for the death of 
his brother. How many men he killed can not be 
stated, but so much alarm was created by his raids 
amongst Rebels the lawyer was notified by a Rebel 
officer that the two or three Union men in town 
would be held accountable for any killingj^izemore 
done. The meaning of this was that the lawyer 
would be assassinated if he did not stop^izmeore's 
slaughter of the Rebels. 

Some time afterwards it was understood that 
j^i^izemore was within five or six miles of the town. 
The lawyer and another Union man went out to 
see^izemore and inform him of the threat ; while 
within a quarter of a mile ofOc^izemore's camp a 
Rebel force came dashing by, and taking (JCizemore 
by surprise, routed his men and took some of his 
horses, but hurt nobody. This was another criti- 



\ 



1 82 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

cal position in which the lawyer found himself, 
but he was not arrested, and returned home. The 
same influence that shielded him heretofore doubt- 
less interposed in his behalf. But as time brought 
things near the crisis in the general war, so the dan- 
ger grew more apparent every coming and depart- 
ure of Federal forces to and from the town. His 
danger was imminent, because these forces invaria- 
bly came to his house, and the idea got amongst 
the Rebels that he was giving them information and 
counsel. On one occasion a mounted company of 
Federal soldiers came suddenly into the town, 
passed his house at a gallop and surrounded the 
house of a colonel in the Rebel army. The colonel 
happened to discover the cavalry in time to make 
his escape. The rebel force was a short distance 
from town and the cavalry immediately returned. 
In a few days the fugitive colonel with a battalion 
came into the town. The lawyer, walking through 
the main street with his eldest daughter, numer- 
ous soldiers being in the street, he was accosted 
by this colonel in very rough, blasphemous and 
insulting language. In surprise, he said : ' * What 
do you mean by such language to me?" The 
colonel replied with an oath, *' You set the Feder- 
als on me and tried to have me captured." The 
lawyer and daughter were in the midst of Rebel 
soldiers ready to execute any order the colonel 
might give. The lawyer replied, **I did no such 
thing." The charge was repeated in similar lan- 
guage, which roused the lawyer to retort that it 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 83 

was false. The soldier said not a word, and the 
lawyer, holding his daughter's hand, walked off to 
his home. He probably would have been arrested 
but a brave soldier naturally sympathizes with 
one who stands alone, but shows no white feather. 
A difficulty between the colonel and the lawyer 
before the war may have had something to do in 
evoking the present incident. Some of the law- 
yer's friends feared he would be arrested that night, 
but some unlucky wind turned their faces to some 
other direction, and the next morning not a soldier 
was to be seen. All the forces of General Burn- 
side not being needed below Knoxville, he sent 
two regiments to the lawyer's town under the 
command of Colonel Garrard, who remained in 
the town several days and was then removed four 
miles above the town to camp at Big Creek, where 
he remained some time. 

One morning after breakfast the lawyer stepped 
to his front door, when the sudden roar of cannon 
broke upon his ear. He listened ; — another and 
another, — then the dim clatter of musketry; and 
thus the cannon boomed and musketry rattled 
for some minutes, and all was hushed. The Rebel 
General -^^.t^. Jones, with a superior force, had 
stolen upon Garrard, attacked and routed the Ohio 
regiment, Garrard and his staff escaping with miost 
of the regiment. The brave Daniel Carpenter and 
his Tennessee boys stood their ground, and it was 
this intrepid regiment whose guns had been heard. \ 
They fought until surrounded — some of them 



184 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

killed, more wounded and most of them, with their 
chivalrous commander, were obliged to surrender. 
A few hours afterwards some soldiers with ambu- 
lances brought the wounded men of Carpenter's 
command into the town and one of the hotels was 
turned into an impromptu hospital and some were 
quartered in private houses. One noble woman, 
the wife of one of the men taken to Richmond by 
the Rebels before mentioned, though she had a 
large family and limited means, took a number of 
them, and with the benevolence never beheld 
within the lawyer's knowledge, nursed and fed 
them like a mother. She is now in that better 
land of the blessed, doubtless ; but let her husband, 
children and friends, who yet live, keep fresh in 
memory the name and virtues of Mrs. A. P. 
Caldwell. 

Nor should be forgotten the noble self-sacrifice of 
the benevolent Russell family, who nursed anoble 
soldier at great labor and self-denial for weeks, until 
death closed his eyes and ended his sufferings. These 
men were left by the Rebels to be taken care of by 
Union people, and here, as in similar cases, the 
Rebels seemed to be totally indifferent to their fate. 
One, whose name was Roberson, died, and the 
lawyer, with three or four Union men, buried him 
in the churchyard of the Second Church, then 
vacant. The lawyer and a few others buried the 
soldier who died at Russell's, as also a soldier 
from Michigan, who died at Mrs. Caldwell's. One 
other Tennessee boy died at the hotel ; his father 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 85 

came from Knox County and took him home to 
bury him. The most excellent and pious doctor, 
Hugh Walker, ministered to such as had need of 
medical aid. Though a decided Democrat, his 
charity did not fail. The already sorrow-stricken 
family gf Elijah Russell (now very aged) had more 
to suffer. The young man Crawford, mentioned 
in Judge Baxter's letter, was the grandson of Mr. 
Russell. A weakly youth and his widowed mother 
could not get a passport beyond the Rebel lines. 
When General Burnside came in, this young man 
joined a company of home guards to defend Union 
families. His company was attacked by a Rebel 
commander. Colonel Wihiam Brazelton, and cap- 
tured, and after young Crawford had surrendered, 
he was shot by Colonel Brazelton himself, as was 
alleged. He lingered until his mother reached 
him and then died in her arms. He was a noble 
Christian boy ; before the war was engaged in 
selling Bibles and Christian literature in destitute 
families. Thus, the last man of the Russell family, 
except the old grandfather, had fallen by the 
hands of the Rebels. The rough raider, General 
John H. Morgan, with his flying brigade of Rebels, 
came into town and made .his headquarters at the 
College. The lawyer, when a boy, knew Mor- 
gan's grandfather, John W. Hunt, who was a lead- 
ing merchant in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1820. 
John's father was from Alabama, and married the 
old man's daughter, a very accomplished young 
lady, who became the mother of this renowned 
16 



l86 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

officer, John had all the pride of caste peculiar 
to his birth and surroundings, and soon allowed 
friends, foes and neighbors to witness it. An 
order w^as sent from his headquarters to bring be- 
fore him all the Union men in the town and 
vicinity; they w^ere summoned to appear before 
this military celebrity. The lawyer felt curious 
to see how this one Murat had waxed so great as 
to know the special business in hand. Appear- 
ing, as commanded, he recognized his Kentucky 
stock in his personnel, and very soon the air and 
bearing of the slave autocrat. In substance his 
speech was: " Confederate soldiers or citizens must 
not be miolested in any manner by Lincoln men. 
If armed bands, calling themselves Federal soldiers, 
should molest or kill any citizen of Southern sym- 
pathies, as^izemore had been doing, the Union 
citizens would be held accountable for such out- 
rages. The life of a Union man should pay for 
the life of any one loyal to the Confederacy." As 
there were but two or three Union men in the 
town and present on this occasion, they felt the 
speech addressed to themselves, in a quite par- 
ticular and personal manner. There was no reply 
to be made to this speech, as it was much in the 
manner of the death sentence. The Union men 
retired from the august presence. The lawyer was 
the marked man, but the ** Great Raider" did not 
honor the town by a long sojourn. The sound of 
horses and their riders in the distance put the gal- 
loping brigade into its normal tramp, and lo ! they 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 8/ 

were not there. General Humphrey Marshall, an 
old college-mate of the lawyer, also came into the 
town, but he gave the Union men no trouble. The 
rebel non-combatants were under the necessity to 
change their base very often, and several men of 
note of that class made the town a temporary re- 
fuge. The pastor of the oldest Presbyterian 
Church of Knoxville, and a relative of his, the son 
of the lawyer's last legal preceptor, stalwarts of. 
secession, made a temporary sojourn on their re- 
treat from the contagion of loyalty. Their stay 
was short. Quarters were becoming uncomforta- 
bly close, and *' Sherman's March to the Sea" 
was narrowing the area of secession in Dixie, while 
General Gillen's brigade soon occupied the town. 
The main force of the Rebels in upper East Ten- 
nessee were on the south side of the Holston, 
above Greenville. Gillen's command took up the 
line of march to Greenville. The lawyer went 
aloncr and reached Greenville in the afternoon, 
found all quiet above there ; but tidings from be- 
low were not comforting. There were rumors 
that Wheeler's Rebel cavalry in force was between 
Greenville and Knoxville, moving up the railroad 
and destroying it. Next morning, Gillen's com- 
mand was in motion on the back track towards 
the lawyer's town, which was reached at night in 
the midst of a terrible thunder-storm. In the 
meantime, Sherman was understood to be coming 
upon Wheeler's track, and the latter officer struck 
with speed towards the Cumberland Mountains, 



1 88 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

while General Gillen took a more northerly direc- 
tion towards Virginia, through Hancock, but for- 
tunately the country was so rough as to intercept 
his travel, and thus his march was delayed- until 
he learned Wheeler was flying the other way, 
when he leisurely marched toward Knoxville by 
the way of Bean's Station; his brigade not being 
within thirty miles of Wheeler at any time during 
the raid. This was a retreat in good order upon 
rumor. The lawyer remained at home, as his 
services were not likely to be required on the re- 
treat. Some time afterwards, General Gillen's 
command was at Bull's Gap. The Rebels were in 
considerable force some distance east of the Gap. 
Colonel Kirk's regiment was about a mile in ad- 
vance of headquarters. Suddenly guns were heard 
in the front and "to horse ! " the command rushed 
apparently ready for the fray. The lawyer sat on 
his horse beside Colonel Miller and saw the flush 
of his face as he eagerly looked to see the Rebels 
advance ; but they did not come and the lawyer 
did not see a battle. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 89 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

By the first of January, 1864, food had become 
scarce and appeared more so than it really was, as 
citizens concealed it. The lawyer had not been 
able to lay in his usual supplies in the fall, and in 
January, 1864, he found his stock of provisions 
running short. He had not been able to keep a 
horse regularly since the summer of 1862. One 
cold, snowy, rough day, through the kindness of 
a granger, he obtained a horse, and set out to 
hunt supplies. He rode about eight miles to the 
farm of a Union man and told his business. The 
farmer said : " I killed so many hogs and I knew 
if the Rebels found them out they would take 
them, so I hid them away and I have them now, 
and you shall have as much of them as you want ; 
and a Mr. C. went up the road this morning hunt- 
ing corn with a wagon, who will hardly be loaded, 
and I will put the bacon on his wagon, and you 
take care that the Rebels don't get it." ''Well, 
Brice, what shall I pay you for it?" ''Never 
mind," said he, "about the pay now; when the 
war is over we will settle that." The lawyer went 
a mile further, and secured some corn from his 
client, Looney. After the war Brice and the 



IpO THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

lawyer settled about the bacon very satisfactorily, 
and he felt grateful to his friends for their helping 
him in his time of need. Clothing had become 
scarce ; material could not be gotten, and there 
was no money to buy it. The lawyer's good wife 
and daughters patched and mended, and his Sun- 
d?.y pantaloons were turned front to the rear to 
hide patches. In the progress of the year, the 
supply of bread ran low. The lawyer had pro- 
cured a few bushels of wheat wdiich had been hid- 
den in a garret with his meat and other small 
articles. This wheat must now be ground with 
much trouble and delay. The lawyer procured an 
old stack of bones in the form of a horse and an 
old rickety carryall, neither horse nor carryall 
strong enough to freight the wheat and the lawyer 
too. So the wheat was loaded up, and the skeleton 
started pulling the reeling, squeaking vehicle after 
him, and the lawyer walked and drove the old 
horse four miles to a mill belonging to a loyal 
man, waited until It was ground, loaded up his 
flour and drove the old horse and walked himself 
back to town, making on that day a trip 
of eight miles. He was not molested on the 
route. He had bought thirty cords of Avood, 
ready to be hauled, within two miles of town. He 
had gotten a yoke of oxen and agreed to let a 
man have them upon the condition that the man 
would deliver the wood at his house in toMm ; the 
man took the oxen off, sold them, and the lawyer 
lost them, and the man never hauled the wood. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I9I 

In the midst of a storm, the lawyer took an axe, 
went upon a high ridge, cut a small oak, and at 
about dark managed to get it home. Snow sev- 
eral inches deep. Shortly after, Colonel Vaughn's 
Rebel regiment came into town, found the lawyer 
had this cord wood. They were magnanimous 
enough to drop some of it at his door. Bare of 
clothing, he was greatly gratified by the receipt 
of a letter from Knoxville, written by his friend, 
Hon. A. A. Kyle, with a full suit of cloth clothes 
for himiself and supplies of clothing for his family. 
Just before. Dr. John Shields sent him three yards 
of jeans, woven by this fam.ily, for pantaloons, so 
that the lawyer thanked his friends and became 
no less loyal. The fortunes of the Confederacy 
were rapidly weaning. The loyal States so long 
distracted by domestic traitors, claiming to be 
Democrats and for the Union, as it was, were now 
thoroughly roused. President Lincoln and the 
Congress had at last discovered that physical force 
could alone crush this gigantic conspiracy against 
the life of the nation, and now were resolved to do, 
and did, what they ought to have done in 1862. 
Now the command of the armies was given to a 
man who never was heard to admit a defeat, 
even when repulsed, whose purpose never faltered, 
whose hand never slacked, and who, by the mag- 
netism of his own heroism, drew around him the 
invincible spirits of the land. " Go," said Lincoln 
to Grant, "and crush this serpent's head ; strike 
the top and the bottom will fall out." And see 



lg2 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the mailed hand of this mighty leader striking the 
Rebel hosts right and left, pressing Lee back 
upon Richmond, while his favorite subaltern and 
peer in prowess pushed Bragg out of his com- 
mand, and forces Hood deep down into the busy 
heart of Dixie. How the slaveocrats began to 
howl and roar like sucking doves. Atlanta falls, 
and with it the brave and noble Francis M. Walker, 
the lawyer's former junior partner ; allow a 
tear to his memory. Hood retires, and Johnson, 
the Fabius of the Confederacy, slowly recedes in 
the direction of Richmond, leaving Sherman to 
make leisurely visitations to the various sections 
of the country which had grown the valiant men, 
one of whom could whip five Yankees. True, it 
was sacred soil, but Sherman was a vandal, and 
did not worship the gods of that people ; their 
most sacred cities, Columbia and Charleston, the 
first seceding, and the last firing the first gun of 
the war, were no more respected than their little 
towns. Doubtless, many hoary secessionists of 
both sexes took up the doleful lamentation, Alas ! 
alas for these sacred cities, that they should be 
desecrated by the feet of these Northern vandals, 
while the negroes clapped their hands, shouted 
and danced, for their jubilee had come. While 
these dark portents of the coming fall of confeder- 
ate power frightened the more craven spirits of 
East Tennessee, many were made more fierce 
and reckless. So critical had the lawyer's position 
become that his friends thought it best for his 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. I93 

safety to go to Knoxville, but how to get there 
was the question. About the first of February, 
1865, he learned of a married lady whose husband 
was then in Knoxville and who desired to go to 
him. She was then temporarily at the house of 
her brother-in-law, who was a Rebel sympathizer. 
It was arranged that this lady and the lawyer 
should go to Knoxville in company, whenever the 
Rebel scouts, who were passing up and down the 
country every few days, should be above the 
town. A Union man, a friend of the lawyer's, 
learned his design and sent him a very fine young 
horse. Such families as had friends in Knoxville, 
brought letters to the lady and a few to the 
lawyer, one from the Rev. Mr. Austin to Governor 
Brownlow. A lawyer, who resided near Bean 
Station, an original secessionist, was in the town, 
because his home was too near Knoxville to be 
very comfortable on account of his antecedents, 
professed to be the lawyer's friend, gave him a 
note to one Clark, a sort of partisan leader in 
Granger County, with the assurance of protection 
by Clark out of respect to the writer. The town 
had been quiet for several days and they supposed 
the way was open to Knoxville. Bidding farewell 
to his anxious wife and daughters, the lady mounted 
on a strong mule and the lawyer on his friend's 
horse, left the town, taking the old stage road. 
The morning was cloudy and dark ; they traveled 
near four miles, meeting no one, but within the 
fourth of a mile of '' Marble Hall," they were met 
17 



194 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEX. 

by twelve armed men ; the lady turned out of the 
road to the left, while the lawyer rode between 
her and the line of armed men. Meeting the head 
of the line, the lawyer was accosted. 

''Where are you going?" He replied, "To 
Knoxville." ''What are you going for?" The 
answer — "Upon my own business and some for 
other people." "How long do you expect to be 
gone?" The answer — "I do not know; I hope 
not long. " * ' Have you any letters ? " was asked. 
A^nswer — "Yes, a few," handing two or three 
from his pocket. The letter from Austin to 
Brownlow was in his saddle-pockets. His letters 
were looked at and returned. "Has that lady 
any letters?" "You may ask her," was answered. 
Troutman turned off to the lady, who delivered a 
bundle, and the squad gathered to look at them, 
leaving one Fleming to engage the lawyer's atten- 
tion. Fleming asked, "Do you know John M. 
Fleming, at Knoxville?" Lawyer— " Very well." 
Fleming— "When you see John tell him his moth- 
er would like to have some clothes." Just then 
the squad began to huddle the letters together to 
take them off. The lawyer seeing this called out, 
"Don't take the letters off, but if you want to ex- 
amine them ride back to Marble Hall, and if any 
should not go to Knoxville, destroy them, but let 
the lady take the remainder to her friends, who 
would like to get them. " And back to Marble 
Hall they went, dismounted, told the lawyer to 
some in and help look at them. The lawyer dis- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 95 

mounted, took the Brownlow letter out of the 
saddle-pockets, leaving the lady on her mule. The 
letters were opened and read, but nothing devel- 
oped. The good lady of the house got possession 
of most of them. A huge Rebel stepped up to the 
lawyer and said, * ' You have something we would 
like to see. " "Yes," said the lawyer, "a letter 
to Governor Brownlow." This produced a stir. 
It was handed out. This was contraband, and 
laying his hand upon the lawyer's coat collar he 
said, ''What have you in this?" and running his 
hand down, feeling for his pocket-book, asked to 
see it. It was shown, and the Rebel turned over a 
few greenbacks, looked at tliem very earnestly. 
Mrs. Charles H. Rice, for that Avas the lady's 
name, came very close to him. The Rebel said, 
"I will not take his money." Mrs. Rice said, 
"You examined it very closely," and the pocket- 
book was returned. Just then the gang started 
out and left the lawyer and Mrs. Rice to gather 
up the letters. This done, the lawyer went out 
and found this man Fleming putting his saddle on 
the lawyer's horse, and before he could get to him 
Fleming mounted and galloped off at full speed. 

The man Clark was of the company, and was 
then told of the note written to him by the Bean 
Station lawyer, and was asked whether they would 
allow his horse to be taken in that way. Clark 
ripped out a terrible oath and said, "Yes; any 
man who will take a letter to Brownlow ought to 
have his horse taken." In the meantime Fleming 



196 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

was out of sight From Clark's manner and from 
his statements in the town to which he immedi- 
ately went, he was on the point of shooting the 
lawyer, but a Dr. Blivins, a Rebel surgeon, hap- 
pened to ride up and remonstrate, saying it was 
wrong and would be retaliated by the Federals. 
The band w^as understood to be under the com- 
mand of one Gallagher. The lawyer was thus left 
with his saddle and bridle and an old bare-footed, 
sore-backed mare, which Fleming had left in place 
of the fine horse. 

Under the momentary excitement the lawyer 
proposed to return to the town, but the lady and 
Mr. and Mrs. C. Rice prevailed upon him to go 
on. Mounting, the lawyer and lady pursued their 
way, nieeting solitary soldiers two or three miles 
until they reached Chop Lack ; here they were in- 
formed that a Rebel force had been scattered along 
all day, and how many were behind was not known. 

The lawyer took the lady's mule and his one- 
eyed mare into a back yard, and there concealed 
them while they stopped in the house of Mrs. 
Minerva Blevins. Late in the afternoon they re- 
sumed their route, but before they had proceeded 
far beyond a mile they met a whole captain's com- 
pany of Rebel cavalry. The lady again turned 
off to the left and the lawyer rode between her 
and the line of soldiers. Not a word was said un- 
til the rear of the company had been reached ; 
the captain then turned out to meet the lawyer. 
Politely bowing, he asked if there was any news 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 9/ 

above. The lawyer replied, ''None; everything 
is quiet above." The captain said, -''We had a 
little fight withglCizemore below, took some of his 
horses, but his men got away. Good evening, 
sir," and passed on. That night the travelers 
stopped at the Red Bridge, and were kindly enter- 
tained by Mrs. Rogers. Very early next morn- 
ing news was brought that a company of Rebel 
cavalry were coming down the road, and were 
about one mile off. This, with the events of the 
previous day, looked ominous of evil. Starting 
as soon as possible, and reaching the road leading 
to the river, the main road was left, and proceed- 
ing some half-mile, the party met Captain John 
Profet, who put them in the way to reach the 
river, and they rode down it on the north bank 
toward Knoxville. Thus they pursued their 
dubious route, zigzag, to avoid the public road, 
until they got beyond the reach of these Rebel 
bands. Three days and nights were spent in 
making the trip of about sixty miles. The fourth day 
at noon Knoxville was reached. The lady stopped 
in East Knoxville with a relative and the lawyer 
walked across First Creek, leading the old mare 
to Crozier Street. Meeting a man near Lion's 
boarding house who was from his own county, he 
called out, *' Haloo there! you want to sell that 
mare?" ''Yes," answered the lawyer quickly. 
"What will you take for her?" "Thirty dol- 
lars," was the answer, and the bare-footed, sore- 



190 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

backed, one-eyed bag of bones was sold to him at 
thirty dollars, and the lawyer went into the board- 
ing house, where he remained all night. The 
man Clark was soon after killed. 



•HREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 1 99 



CHAPTER XXV. _ 

The lOth of February, 1865, found the lawyer 
sixty miles from home, his dependent family, a 
feeble wife and two female children, with a half- 
dozen slaves. He committed them to that kind 
Providence which had kept them and him through 
the trials of the past. The city was now very 
much like a military camp: the heights scarred 
with rifle pits and boarding-houses of all grades 
full of refugees or quondam traitors seeking am- 
nesty by oaths taken to save the labor of the 
hangman and their property from confiscation, 
impenitent and hating the government they were 
swearing to support. There were no regular 
hotels in the proper sense of the term. The Lamar 
House, at which the lawyer had been in the habit 
of stopping from time to time while attending 
Federal and Supreme Courts, had been stripped 
of its furniture, and was now kept by two gentle- 
men with an impromptu furniture of common sort. 
To this house he went in the morning after reach- 
ing Knoxville to secure lodgings. He found no 
place empty, but was furnished a room in the 
third story without carpet, wash-stand or anything 
else than the most common bed and a single 



200 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

chair, and plain food, for fifteen dollars per week ; 
this was the best he could do. This matter ar- 
ranged, he went out to meet such acquaintances 
as might be found and see what business he could 
get to meet this expensive mode of living, his 
stock of ready cash being small. He soon met 
many friends who sympathized with him in his es- 
cape from durance vile, in which he had been so 
long kept within Rebel lines amongst many others 
—Hon. Seth J. W. Lucky, A. A. Kyle, Thomas 
A. R. Nelson and others. The Federal and 
States Courts had been re-established in Knox 
County; and though Lee and Johnston were 
still in the field attempting to stem the tide which 
soon overwhelmed them, the lawyer and the 
courts on the one hand, and General Samuel Car- 
ter with his blue jackets on the other, were busily 
engaged in righting some of the wrongs which 
had been done by the ''valiant Rebels" in their 
day of power. West Humphreys had fled to 
the shades of Cerberus, on the Siberian Bogs, and 
the bench was now worthily filled by Hon. Con- 
nelly F. Trigg, who had fled across the mountains 
into Kentucky in 1862, pursued, but nothing cap- 
tured save his saddle-bags, now was returned to 
dispense justice to those who made him fly. 
George Brown had found the private station the 
post of safety, if not of honor, and the Hon. 
Elijah T. Hall now held the balances so evenly 
that even Rebels could not charge injustice, and 
loyal men got their rights so far as the laws could 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 20I 

restore them. Some wrongs could not be re- 
dressed, but await the Great Assize, at which the 
judgments of human tribunals will be reviewed 
and all unadjudged causes heard and determined 
according to the eternal principles of Truth, Jus- 
tice and Mercy. 

Hon. A. A. Kyle procured the lawyer his first 
considerable fee. A distant relative of Mr. 
Kyle's, with another person, had been sued in the 
Circuit Court of Knox County for damages of 
;^25,ooo. Through Mr. Kyle's influence the law- 
yer was retained for the defense at a thousand 
dollars. 

As was to have been expected, the Union men 
who had been driven from their homes by the 
military usurpers, aided in many instances by non- 
combatants, and now returned to their plundered 
homes, and insulted wives, and naked and hungry 
children, should feel the blood grow hot when in 
the presence of men who thus acted. About 
dark one evening the lawyer walked down Gay 
Street and was joined by an acquaintance at Mitch- 
el's drug store, where his old friend. Captain Beal, 
with several others stood. The lawyer had not 
seen him since he left their own town to join the 
army. The meeting, of course, was very cordial, 
but the captain, turning to the man by the lawyer's 

side, said, *^Is your name ?" The man re- 

phed, ' ' Yes. " Immediately the captain struck him 
a furious blow with his cane and beat him severe- 
ly, — indeed, endangering his life, until he was, 



\ 



202 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

with great effort, caught and held until the man 
got away. The captain then told the lawyer the 
man had ill-treated his family while he was a pris- 
oner in Andersonville. 

Such occurrences were not uncommon. Indeed, 
it was dangerous for a Rebel to appear in the 
streets in Knoxville if known to have persecuted 
Union people during the continuance of the 
usurpation. It would be gross neglect not to men- 
tion here the character of Northern people toward 
the poor and destitute people of East Tennessee. 

Four years of very partial tillage of the soil, 
with the ravages of war, in almost every part of 
East Tennessee, had made supplies of all sorts 
scarce and high in price, while the thing called 
money would scarcely buy at any price. 

The lawyer before leaving home had procured 
one bushel of salt at twenty-five dollars. This des- 
titution prompted the transmission of supplies 
from the loyal States by philanthropists and loyal 
.men, and Knoxville was a centre-port for their 
distribution, and very helpful it was to many 
worthy families and individuals. Prior to this the 
Northern heart had not been understood in the 
South. The Southern idea of Northern men, and 
women as well, was that of cold selfishness, cun- 
ning, avaricious, unscrupulous, hunting the dollar 
at home and abroad, in all lands and amongst all 
people, even to the ends of the earth ; and that 
other idea of theirs, non-combativeness, was be- 
gotten of this supposed love of money. The bat- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2O3 

ties of war and the overflowing charities which had 
spread themselves over the South like waters from 
the clouds have shown how little the South knew 
of the noble impulses of that brave, generous, in- 
dustrious, enterprising and hardy people. East 
Tennessee should ever remember that the loyal 
Northern heart was with them in all their dangers, 
privations and sufferings, and the whole South 
should quit the lead of their worst enemies — those 
who led them into rebellion; forget the dead 
slaveocracy ; give up their foolish and anti-Christian 
prejudices, and recognize the fact that the war was 
God's instrument, rough in its use, but most ben- 
eficial in its results to all classes of the people — 
opening up to the nation a prospect of prosperity, 
happiness and glory which shall in history eclipse 
the grandeur of all ancient and modern nationali- 
ties. Will the South understand and act upon 
this truth? 

On the nth of March, 1865, a little more than 
a month after the lawyer reached Knoxville, Pres- 
ident Lincoln caused a commission to be made out 
at the State Department in Washington, which 
was forthwith sent to the lawyer, as United States 
Attorney for the District of East Tennessee, and 
the lawyer entered upon the duties of that office. 
The Federal Courts having been re-established in 
the year 1864, a district attorney had been ap- 
pointed {;pro tern.) by the Circuit Judge. That 
officer had inaugurated some business in the Dis- 
trict and Circuit Courts under the acts of Congress 



204 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

relating to the Rebellion. The act of Congress 
of 17th of July, 1862, entitled: An Act to sup- 
press Insurrection, to punish Treason and Rebel- 
lion, to seize and confiscate the property of Rebels, 
and for other purposes; by the Eighth Section pro- 
vided. That the several courts aforesaid shall have 
power to make such orders, establish such forms 
of decrees and sale, and direct such deeds and 
conveyances to be executed and delivered by the 
marshal thereof, where real estate shall be sub- 
ject of sale as shall fully and efficiently effect the 
purposes of this act and vest in the purchaser of 
such property good and valid titles thereto; and 
the said court shall have po^ver to allow such fees 
and charges of their officers as shall be reasonable 
and proper in the premises. 

This was the main confiscation act, and in the 
class of confiscation cases clearly vested the courts 
with the power to allow the officers such compen- 
sation as such courts might deem reasonable' and 
proper. The District Attorney {jpro tern.) having 
filed information under this act against the prop- 
erty of Rebels in several cases, the first step taken 
by the lawyer as District Attorney was to consult 
the Hon. Judge Trigg, in whose court such in- 
formation had been filed, in regard to those fees 
and charges, because the attorney 2')ro tern, had 
filed the informations only, and the present at- 
torney must prosecute them. In that consulta- 
tion it was distinctly understood by the judge and 
attorney that the matter of compensation in con- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 205 

fiscation cases was wholly under the control and 
direction of the judges of the courts, and wholly 
independent of any legislation by Congress as to 
fees and emoluments and other classes of cases. 
The judge then told the attorney he would appor- 
tion the fees in cases then pending between the 
late attorney j^ro tern, and the then present 
attorney, and this was done, as the records fully 
show. In this the judge followed the opinion of 
the Attorney General, Hon. Edward Bates, as is 
seen from the following circular : 

"Attorney General's Office,! 
January 8, 1863. J 
"General instructions to District Attorneys and 

Marshals relative to proceedings under the act 

of Congress for Confiscation : 

"The President of the United States has charged 
the Attorney General with the superintendence 
and direction of all proceedings to be had under 
the act of Congress of the 17th of July, 1862, and 
the act of August 6th, 1 86 1, commonly called the 
"Confiscation Laws," authorized and required 
him to give to the attorneys and marshals such in- 
structions and directions as he may find needful 
and convenient touching all such seizures, pro- 
ceedings and condemnations. In the execution 
of that duty I find it necessary to give but a few 
preliminary instructions relative to the seizure of 
property, with a view to condemnation under the 
law. 



206 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

** The law requires the proceedings to begin with 
seizures. When once seized and property reported 
to the district attorney, it will be proceeded 
against in court. Then each case becomes an ac- 
tion pending, and the laws themselves are the 
sufficient instruction to both the attorney and 
marshal in all ordinary cases. If unforeseen diffi- 
culties arise in the progress of a cause, so as to em- 
barrass the district attorney or marshal as to his 
mode of proceeding, he should report to this 
office, stating the precise facts, and asking instruc- 
tions upon the point of his difficulty. 

**With regard to seizure of property, the follow- 
ing instructions are given : 

* ' I . All seizures will be made by the marshals of 
the proper district, under written authority to be 
given him by the district attorney, specifying 
with reasonable certainty the property to be 
seized and the owner, whose right is sought to 
be confiscated. 

*'2. When the marshal has seized any property 
under such authority, he will, without any un- 
necessary delay, make a true return thereof, in 
writing, to the district attorney. 

' ' 3. The district attorney shall keep in his office, 
fairly written in a book, a duplicate or exact copy 
of every such order of seizure made by him and 
directed to the marshal, and the marshal keep in 
his office, fairly written in a book, a duplicate or 
exact copy of every return of seizure which he 
shall make to the district attorney, and this, as 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 20/ 

well for their own safety as for the information of 
the government and the court. 

*'4. The issuing of the order of seizure is trusted 
to the discretion of the district attorney, and while 
he ought to be vigilant to execute the law, he 
ought to be careful to avoid hasty and improvi- 
dent seizures. In every instance he ought to be 
satisfied that there is ''probable cause" for the 
seizure, and that he has reasonable ground to be- 
lieve that he can prove in court the facts necessary to 
warrant the condemnation ; for otherwise, besides 
the injustice done to individuals, the government 
will be put to great expense and will be discredited 
by the frequent failure of its prosecutions. The 
district attorney must necessarily do this part of 
his duty upon his own judgment and his responsi- 
bility. He is on the spot and has the means of 
knowledge while this office can not have the 
requisite information of the facts, nor govern the 
details of prosecution in the multitude of cases 
that will probably arise in all the districts of the 
nation. 

''5. As to the manner of making the seizures, I 
can do little more than suggest methods of con- 
venience. When the State laws direct the method 
of seizure, it should be conformed to as nearly as 
may be consistent with the object of the acts of 
Congress. If the thing to be seized be personal 
property, it ought to be actually seized and safely 
kept ; if real estate, the marshal ought to seize the 
right, title, interest and estate of the accused 



208 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

party, giving notice in writing of the seizure to the 
tenants in possession, if any ; if stock or other 
intangible property, the marshal ought, if there be 
no specific method prescribed by the State law, to 
describe the property as plainly as he can in his 
return, and leave the court to determine the suffi- 
ciency of the seizure. 

''6. I am credibly informed that in various parts 
of the country, property has been seized by mili- 
tary officers, with a view to confiscation under the 
acts of Congress. In all such cases, where the 
military officer in possession is willing to sur- 
render the property to the civil authority to be 
proceeded against according to law, the marshal 
shall receive the same and make return thereof to 
the district attorney, as required in No. 2. 

' ' 7. After the seizure of the property, the district 
attorney will, with all convenient speed, proceed 
in the proper court for the condemnation of the 
property seized. 

*'As this is a new class of business in our courts, 
Congress has thought proper to put your fees and 
compensation upon a new basis. The act of July 
17, 1862, section eight, page 591, prescribes that 
the said courts shall have power to allow such fees 
and charges of their officers as shall be reasonable 
and proper in the premises. 

** Edward Bates, Attorney General." 
There was a certain senator in Congress in the 
year 1864, professing greatly to be for the Union, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 20g 

from the State of Illinois. His name is Lyman 
Trumbull, Esq. And there was a certain As- 
sistant Secretary of the Interior, whose name was 
"Otto." These men, in their great zeal for 
the salvation of the nation, put their heads 
together and concocted a bill entitled: ''An 
Act in Relation to the Fees of the Clerk of the 
Supreme Court, District Attorney and Marshal of 
the District of Columbia, and Other Purposes." 
This bill, it is believed, was leveled at the head of 
Hon. Return J. Meigs, then Clerk of the Supreme 
Court of the District of Columbia. While Con- 
gress and the loyal people were bending all their 
energies to subdue the Rebellion, every officer and 
soldier in the army, and in the civil service as well, 
urged and stimulated by the favors of the govern- 
ment to discharge their whole duty upon every 
theatre of action, these men got through the 
Congress a measure, which, if it had been under- 
stood as subsequently interpreted, would have 
been rebuked by those bodies as hostile to the 
war. Suppose Congress had been asked on the 
27th of June, 1864, to reduce the soldiers' pay, 
would not every loyal man have said, the mover 
of that proposition was a traitor at heart ? This 
bill has been construed to be in principle precisely 
like that. The confiscation law was to be crip- 
pled. Is it at all wonderful that this man Trum- 
bull was superseded in the Senate, and that he 
should be now a full blown Democrat ? The name 
Otto is so round as to scarcely be kept from rolling ; 
18 



2IO THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

where he has rolled is not known, nor is it 
naaterial. Neither the Hon. Judge Trigg, the 
District Attorney, p}0 tem.y or the new District 
Attorney, knew anything about this act of 27th of 
June, 1864; nor did Mr. Otto or any other official 
at Washington ever give an intimation that such 
an act existed, or in any way affected the fees and 
charges of the officers of the court. Under the 
eighth section of the act of the 17th of July, 1862, 
before mentioned, during the four years of the 
•lawyer's official term, to-wit: from March i8th, 
1863, to March 1 8th, 1869, so that for his whole 
term the attorney and the court acted under that 
law of 1862, supposing that all allowances made 
by the court to said district attorney in confisca- 
tion cases, were rightfully to be kept by him and 
used as his own. When the attorney's term com- 
menced, March, 1863, General Grant was be- 
sieging Richmond and Petersburg, while General 
Sherman was marching through the Carolinas. In 
the meantime the agents of the government were 
actively employed in East Tennessee in making 
seizures of Rebels' property, real and personal, 
and reporting the same to the district attorney for 
libel ; and many were coming in to take the oath 
of amnesty to avoid the penalty of treason, while 
the armies in Virginia and Carolina were still 
struggling in the dying throes of the Rebellion. 
Upon the surrender of Lee on the 9th and Johnson 
on the 25th of April, a flood-tide set in of all 
grades. of Rebels and Rebel sympathizers towards 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN, 211 

Kiioxville. The Federal court met in May, 1865, 
and the hundreds already under bonds came, and 
witnesses swarmed before the court with their 
stories of treason and traitors. The district at- 
torney and grand jury worked like beavers for 
weeks and got in shape only a portion of the mul- 
titudinous cases. What a contrast was now pre- 
sented in the appearance and conduct of the great 
throng of people in the city of Knoxville to the 
crowd which held high carnival in March, 1862, 
in the same city, under the reign of Isham Harris 
and his minions; then Tennessee was a sovereign \ 
State and Isham her ** quasi king;" then ''to the 
sword", ''to the cannon, and the battle" was the 
trumpet call of stalwart heroes of the stars and bars; 
" go with your State, " "fight for your rights," was 
the eloquent exhortation of lawyers, judges and high 
privates ; but now anxious apprehensions of im- 
pending doom, the tremor of unstrung nerves, 
the pale cheek from which the blood shrunk back, 
marked the masses as they listened to be called to 
their account by injured Union men or the proc- 
lamation of law. There were a few whose Rebel- 
lion became more intense as they witnessed scenes 
thus presented. Baker's murder of William Hall 
brought sudden destruction upon himself, and 
Ashby provoked his death at the hand of the Hon. , 
E. C. Camp. Indictments for treason, and aid 
and comfort to rebels, and information against \ 
their property accumulated, until the number 
reached over one thousand ; several hundred of 



212 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

these being informations. The larger number of 
seizures of property was in the counties contigu- 
ous to Knoxville. The Rebels continued to raid 
in the upper counties until after the surrender of 
Lee and Johnson, and, indeed, in the month of May 
in that year, the district attorney had to rely upon 
the military for safety on a flying trip to see his 
family, whom he had not seen since he left them 
in February. Overt treason was a rare crime in 
the United States. The case of Burr was of nation- 
al notoriety ; there was a near approach to it in 
South Carolina, 1833 ; before and since that mem- 
orable discontent there have been traitors but no 
treason, until the slaveholders' Rebellion, which 
was the bursting out of the flame which had been 
smothered for thirty years and was now quenched 
in blood. Though Congress had been slow to 
push its legislation to the extreme point needful to 
break the back of this insurgent leviathan, it had 
nevertheless annexed penalties to the crime which 
might well make the guilty tremble for their lives. 
But where shall a parallel be found in the world's 
history of that magnanimity which marked the 
dealings of the government with its bitter internal 
foes ? While justice was threatened, mercy was 
tendered, and now that the war was over and the 
Rebellion no longer available, and the courts had 
to deal with the offenders, that mercy was accepted 
and thousands, who must have otherwise suffered 
the penalty of their crimes, escaped so easily that 
the whole proceeding had much, the aspect of a 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 213 

drama from which the tragic had been viscerated. 
President Lincohi's proclamation of December, 
1863, was not only in pursuance of the mind of 
Congress, as expressed in the act of July 17, 1862, 
but also the expression of that benevolence for 
which he was so distinguished in public and private 
life. That proclamation was the open door through 
which the material body of the Rebellion re-entered 
their fathers' fortress — the Union. The windy 
element of the Rebellion was not embraced in the 
amnesty, but, though the principle leaders were 
indicted, they did not grace the too loyal East 
Tennessee with their presence, after their sad ex- 
perience of its loyalty. The district attorney had 
some desire to bring Mr. Jefferson Davis before 
an East Tennessee jury and wrote to Attorney 
General Speed that there was an indictment against 
said Davis in the Circuit Court of the United 
States for the district of East Tennessee, and if 
the authorities would send Mr. Davis (who was 
them in Fortress Monroe) to East Tennessee, he 
should have a fair trial ; but other and perhaps 
better counsels prevailed. In the thousands of in- 
dictments in that court, but one was tried who did 
not rely upon an oath of amnesty or special par- 
don. To the indictment against him, the plea of 
not guilty was entered. The charge rested upon 
the fact that he had accepted the appointment of 
conscript officer under the confederate authority. 
The fact was not denied, but he introduced proof 
that he had acted in the interest of Union men. 



214 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

and instead of conscripting, he warned them to get 
away, and the jury acquitted him. 

In September, 1865, the district attorney 
moved his family to Knox County. The duties 
of his office required him to be at Knoxville al- 
most every day, and for four years he rode six 
miles per day to his office and back to his home 
with rare intermissions. The office was no sine- 
cure, but demanded great labor and vigilance 
— vastly more than has been demanded by its du- 
ties since his term of office expired. During his 
four years of service he had no assistant attorney, 
nor was an assistant employed during the whole 
term to aid him, except in one case ; that was a 
suit by the United States against several parties 
who were connected with the public warehouse 
belonging to the government at Chattanooga. In 
that case large interests were involved, and the 
proof to make out the case had to be drawn from 
that city. The district attorney employed the now 
Hon. David M. Key to assist him in working up 
the case, which he did very efficiently, and the 
United States paid him $2']^^ and judgments were 
obtained against several defendants, aggregating 
the sum of ;^i 10,000. There was another case 
from Chattanooga, in which the same honorable 
gentleman was on the other side. The Congress 
had made provision for the purchase of grounds 
in suitable locations near great battle fields for the 
burial of those Union soldiers who had fallen in 
battle or died in the service of the United States. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 21 5 

The battles of Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge 
and Lookout Mountain had left many dead in the 
vicinity of Chattanooga. A cemetery at that place 
was necessary. Negotiations for the purchase of a 
suitable site were opened under the auspices of the 
quartermaster at that place. It was required by 
the law that the purchase should be approved and 
confirmed by the decree of the Federal Court of 
the District. A contract of the purchase of such 
ground at such a price came before the court, en- 
gineered for the owner by the honorable gentle- 
man aforesaid. The district attorney objected to 
the price and procured the appointment' of a com- 
mission to value the land and report the same to 
the court. This was done, but the district attor- 
ney did not regard Chattanooga as the "hub" of 
the universe, and again objected to the price, and 
procured an order that the clerk of the court 
should go to Chattanooga and examine the land, 
take proof as to its value and report the same. 
This was done, and the land was bought for $2^,- 
ooo less than the price first reported. The fact 
that the honorable gentleman who manipulated 
the case for the owner had been a Colonel in the 
Rebel army was not material — he was acting for 
his client. 



2l6 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

The number of cases which brought parties 
to the court, as has been stated, was immense, 
and the court being held in the court-house of 
the county, the second story of whicli furnished 
a large court room, it was crowded with the multi- 
tude so as to endanger human life by the weight 
on the floor, which was evidently yielding to the 
pressure — at one time creating a stampede. Real- 
izing the want of safer and more commodious 
apartments for the court, its officers (who had to 
rent offices) and crowds of parties and witnesses, 
the judge and district attorney consulted the miar- 
shal, who could find no more suitable place in the 
city. The judge then requested the district attor- 
ney to write a letter to the Hon. Horace Maynard, 
representative in Congress from the Second Dis- 
trict of Tennessee, stating the need of a building 
suited to the use of the government in East Ten- 
nessee, requesting him to ask an appropriation by 
Congress for that purpose. The district attorney 
wrote the letter, and made as strong an argument 
in favor of such appropriation as he could, amongst 
other points stating that the United States needed 
such a building in which its separate business 
should be transacted and its officers quartered, so 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 21/ 

that the people might see the government In its 
civil department as they had seen and felt the 
power of its military department. Maynard, as 
ever, attentive to the wants of his people and the 
nation, asked and obtained from the Congress an 
appropriation to build the splendid structure now 
known in the city of Knoxville as the Custom 
House, a marble monument to the memory of the 
Hon. Horace Maynard, the peer of the most 
gifted Southern patriots native born or adopted. 
The assassination of President Lincoln sent a 
thrill of horror through the American heart. That 
a P.ebel confederacy procured it has been fully es- 
tablished, but who were the conspirators beyond 
those convicted and executed is unknown. It is 
not probable parties so obscure and without hope 
of reward would have plotted and in part executed 
such wholesale slaughter of the head of the gov- 
ernment. The initial thought in the mind of the 
loyal nation was that it was the work of the Con- 
federate authorities in whole or part, and that the 
first thought upon given frxts is the true one may 
be applicable here. The curtain of time hides the 
probable truth; when it shall be lifted it will be 
seen. The utterances of Andrew Johnson in the 
Senate coupled with the death of the lamented 
Lincoln created the expectation that upon the ac- 
cession of Johnson to the Presidency a more strin- 
gent policy would be adopted towards the Rebels. 
He had said treason must be made odious and 
traitors punished. The district attorney, with 
19 



2l8 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

much knowledge of the man and the controUing 
principle of his hfe, thought the popular current 
would float him into that policy. He had been 
for Breckinridge as the secession candidate in i860, 
but on Lincoln's election had taken strong ground 
for the union, and escaping to Washington had 
been amongst the most pronounced Unionists in 
the Senate; now. President, the acme of his as- 
pirations had been reached, except that it was ac- 
cidental. To float upon this popular current he 
must be in the same craft with the greatest mili- 
tary leaders and distinguished civilians of the 
times, and while competition is the life of trade it 
often ruins the fondest political -hopes. Mr. John- 
son could not be blamed for the desire to succeed 
himself in the Presidential office. He was a South- 
ern man, and his political antecedents doubtless 
had an influence to lead his mind to that line of 
policy and conduct which separated liim from the 
Republican party and came near costing him his 
official head. For several years before the war 
the district attorney had not been a favorite of the 
great ''commoner's," and as he always had favor- 
ites who would accept good positions (the attor- 
neyship of East Tennessee being regarded as of 
that class), the surrender by the incumbent would 
be acceptable to the President, and furnish a place 
for one who was for '*my policy." A gentleman 
from Washington cam.e to Knoxville and inter- 
viewed the district attorney upon the subject of 
his surrender of the attorneyship, and in lieu 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2lg 

thereof propose his appointment to the judgeship 
of the Chattanooga, or Third Circuit of Tennessee, 
stating that he was authorized to tender this ap- 
pointment. The district attorney dechned the 
overture. Some time in the last year of Mr. John- 
son's term, a warm personal friend of the President 
called on the district attorney and desired to know 
whether the attorney approved the policy of his 
administration? The attorney declined to answer. 
It was not long until the President sent a name to 
the Senate to fill the office of district attorney of 
East Tennessee. The district attorney shortly 
after received a letter from the Hon. Wm. G.>jOAc>^ 
-Kft€wk«i, then a member of the Senate, saying: 
"No new nomination will be confirmed, and when 
your term expires you will be reappointed if 
you desire it." Whether Congress ever acted 
upon Johnson's nomination is not known. The 
nominee was a Colonel in the Federal army and a 
worthy man. Johnson had lost his prestige ; he 
had lost his Democratic friends by joining the Re- 
publicans in 1 86 1, and his Republican friends by \ 
''my pohcy;"'and in spite of great effort to recov- 
er, his sun sat in an eclipse. Johnson's policy 
had run far ahead of any rational anticipation in 
releasing Rebels from the consequences of their 
offenses. If it was not the "Sop to Cerberus" it 
looked much like the "Tub to the whale." 

Shortly before the President's official demise the 
district attorney was instructed to dismiss all pros- 
ecution for treason or aid and comfort to Rebels 



220 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

in the courts of the United States. Whether this 
was a part of the poHcy of reconstruction or a 
blow at the district attorney is not known, or is it 
material. Obedience to his superior was the at- 
torney's plain duty, and it was done. But the 
honorable court endeavored to break the force of 
the blow by the exercise of his just authority, and 
in each judgment of dismissal taxed the United 
States with an attorney's fee of ten dollars, and 
such fees ran up to nearly the sum of ;^ 15,000, not 
a dollar of which has ever been paid to the attor- 
ney. The most irksome duty devolved upon the 
district attorney was the enforcement of the in- 
ternal revenue laws. It is impossible to frame 
laws which may not work harshly in some cases, 
and one of the main reasons why the district attor- 
ney declined a reappointment was the unpleasant- 
ness of prosecuting cases under that system. 
Many parties too poor to pay their expenses to 
the court, and of course unable to pay fines, 
brought from the hills and gorges of the moun- 
tains many of them loyal during the war and almost 
starved by it, yet now prosecuted for having made 
the few gallons of liquid called whisky or brandy, 
sometimes using a tea-kettle for a boiler and a gun 
barrel for a worm ; and others, one-armed or one- 
legged, arrested for selling something of the sort 
from a two-gallon keg to supply means of living, 
as they stated, not otherwise attainable. The dis- 
trict attorney's heart was too small to hold the 
government of the United States in one lobe of it, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 221 

and those poor, crippled, loyal men in the other, 
and therefore determined to allow some "great 
heart" to take his place. He, therefore, informed 
the gentleman who was appointed his successor 
of his design to retire, and was assured by him 
that his name would not be offered if the attorney 
desired to retain the place. 



222 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



\ 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

There was no intrinsic difficulty in fact in the 
reconstruction of the government. The poHticians 
made all the trouble. The status during the war 
was a conflict between two governments as really 
as if they had never been under one control ; the 
one a government dejure; the other a government 
de facto. While the war continued these govern- 
ments stood, and the people in the Southern Con- 
federacy were in fact out of the union, but when 
the war ended the de facto government collapsed 
and the States which had constituted the Confed- 
eracy were conquered States and the United States 
or </^;//;r government had full right to prescribe 
the terms of their restoration precisely as though 
the territory had belonged to the United States 
and governments were to be organized upon it. 
The lawful rights of citizens not forfeited by trea- 
son were in tact, as conquest does not destroy pri- 
vate right except for crime, and such stood pre- 
cisely as in the transition to a territorial or a state 
government, or extension of authority over a con- 
quered province. Whether the action of the 
South be called a rebellion, that is an insurrection 
against lawful authority, or secession, the with 
drawal of fellowship with other States, or revolu- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 223 

tion, which is a change in state or government, the 
practical result is the same. It was a passing out 
and beyond the authority of the United States, 
and a government had to be overthrown just as in 
conflicts in which one nation makes conquests of 
the territory of another, each originally indepen- 
dent. There is no arbiter in war but the sword. 
It practically abrogates all existing rights between 
belligerants. There is a clear distinction between 
insurrection or rebellion and a defacto government. 
The two first are the mere resistance of the laws 
of a recognized government; the last is a denial of 
that government. Allegiance may be rightfully 
due to one government, but practically yielded to 
another. At the close of the war the government 
should have declared each of the States of the 
Confederacy a territory, and should have estab- 
lished territorial governments in each until such 
time as the Congress might see fit to allow them 
to organize State governments. This course 
would have avoided all those questions which 
grew out of the attempt to reorganize the States 
as States and yet apply Congressional legislation 
to their domestic rights and relations. Theory 
should be worth nothing in the face of facts. It is 
not uncommon to find a theory built upon induc- 
tion and inference from some admitted proposition 
which ruins and thwarts the plainest facts and the 
simplest justice. This is illustrated in the theory 
that all the people of a given State are responsible 
in a political sense for the acts of that State and 



224 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

must alike bear the consequences. This results 
from the unity of the official g-overnment which 
represents the people as the State. Theoretically 
all the people are liable to the consequences, be- 
cause in theory all are represented, but every case 
should stand upon its own facts, and a wise and 
just government will not punish alike the guilty 
and the innocent when such innocence can be 
shown. 

The majority of the people in some of the States 
were Rebels, and in other States, claiming to belong 
to the Confederacy, a large minority at least were 
loyal. These loyalists were forced into this prac- 
tical relation to the revolted States and this theo- 
retical status to the United States. Some of the 
legislation of Congress recognized the distinction 
between treason and loyalty in the revolted States. 
The loyal man may ask and obtain indemnity for 
the loss of property taken for the use of the armies 
in the prosecution of the war and damages done 
by the agents of the government ; and the question 
\ forces itself upon the mind in this connection, 

Wherefore does the government refuse to pay loyal 
men, women and children for their slaves? It may 
be objected that the cost to the government would 
be too great. In view of the enormous revenues 
now collected and much of it thrown away upon 
sentimental clap-traps, there is not much force, 
and less grace, in the objection. It may be said 
property in man can not be recognized. Whence 
comes this learning? Under the theocracy of the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 225 

Jewish nation, and in every nation under the sun 
at some period of its history, property in man has 
been recognized by law or custom, and was clearly 
recognized by the fundamental law of the United 
States and the legislation of Congress, under 
which thousands upon thousands of dollars have 
been invested in slaves by persons who did not 
approve the principle of slavery; but from the 
state of society in which they lived were induced 
to vest money in them, often almost, from necessi- 
ty. But the objection rests upon a false assump- 
tion. It is not in the man chiefly that the prop- 
erty exists, it is in his labor. There is no such 
thing as an absolute right of one person in anoth- 
er; all such rights as exist between persons are 
relative and governed by the law or custom of the 
place. . To say that I have not the right to the 
labor of my slave so long as he continues to be my 
slave is to say that I have no right to the labor of 
a man whom I hire and pay for a day, or a month, 
or a year. The law may regulate my treatment of 
a slave, for the law recognizes him as a human be- 
ing while it concedes my right to his labor ; nor 
is the argument affected by the consideration that 
women and children are in the like category. 
The purchase of a female slave's labor gives the 
purchaser the right to that labor, and as the labor 
of the woman must be given to the purchaser her 
labor cannot be bestowed upon her children, ex- 
cept by consent of the purchaser; therefore, the 
law of the land does interpose and for the material 



226 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

benefit of the purchaser and such children who 
otherwise would become a public charge recog- 
nizes the right of the purchaser to the labor of the 
children in consideration of the expense incurred 
in raising them. This relation is the subject of 
contract and law in civilized States, and so long as 
the law recognizes the relation, so long does the 
right exist. Under the law the question is not how 
slavery was introduced ; that belongs to another 
time and other parties. The ethical aspect pre- 
sented in it has no legal relation to the established 
institution more than the right of a prince to rule 
a nation whose great grandfather obtained the 
crown by parricide, fratricide or conquest. It is 
argued the natural relation of mother and child 
fixes the status of the child in that of the 
mother, so far as blood is concerned. This 
is true ; but when the child is born it becomes 
a distinct being, and though a wise Providence has 
mven the mother the affection for the child neces- 
sary to its nature, yet the right is relative, as those 
of the mother and master, and must be regulated 
by law or custom ; therefore, as before stated, the 
right to the labor of the child springs from an 
implied contract between the State and purchaser 
or master; that such labor shall belong to him in 
consideration of nurture in infancy and necessary 
support m mature life. If the loyal Southern men 
had lawful property in slave labor, upon what 
principle of justice can the government of the 
• United States (which, by its direct act, deprived 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 22/ 

him of that labor) refuse to give him compensation 
for such loss ? 

In 1855, on his return from Washington through 
Virginia, a family of slaves had been bought with 
the money which belonged to the lawyer's family; 
these slaves, with some of his own, were left with 
his family in February, 1865, at which time the 
number had been considerably increased and were 
very valuable at the beginning of the war. In 
June, 1865, the lawyer called them up and told 
them they were free, and at this day the most of 
them are settled in homes of their own in the place 
where they were set at liberty. Shall the inno- 
cent and loyal family be told that they are to be 
treated worse than the worst Rebels who got back 
their large landed estates and personal property by 
taking the oath that they would behave them- 
selves better than they had done, while the loyal 
family, which needed no amnesty, must lose its 
property, if slaves ? Is this policy the outgrowth 
of liberty or licentiousness? Is this our boasted 
republicanism or is it despotism ? This is no vindi- 
cation of slavery or apology for it. As it existed 
in many parts of the South, it was a vile institu- 
tion and was rightfully stamped out ; but moral 
character is one thing and legal right is another 
and different thing. Many anti-slavery men in 
the South were slaveholders ; such was the state 
of society that a helpless family could not obtain 
permanent help suitable to its wants and the pur- 
chase of such help was necessary. Such persons 



228 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

were not responsible for the state of society or the 
existence of slavery, which was the main factor in 
the formation of such society born in the slave 
States, inheriting such property from their an- 
cestry, and growing up under the influences of the 
institution, the habits of life formed by it. Anti- 
slavery men acquiesced in this state of things be- 
cause they could not remedy it ; they were units 
out of the great mass of the slaveocracy, and if 
combined, would have been as chaff before the 
wind. There were few loyal slave-holding families 
in East Tennessee ; very few who had so large a 
stock of slave property as the lawyer's family, and 
the very paucity of the number is doubtless one 
main reason why no more attention has been given 
to the subject of their compensation ; a good reason 
why attention should be given to it. The act of 
Congress of the 17th of July, declared the for- 
feiture of all the slave property belonging to per- 
sistent Rebels and the abolition of slavery was a 
needful and proper measure to secure the future 
peace and prosperity of the country ; and as the 
Rebels made such abolition necessary to pay loyal 
men for their slaves, would add a sanction to the 
measure, intensifying the difference between treason 
and loyalty. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 229 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The lawyer's term of office expired in March, 
1869. The Federal Courts met in January of that 
year, because of the change in the times of hold- 
ing these courts from May and November to Jan- 
uary and July. No court had been held in Novem_ 
ber, 1868 ; as a consequence, the business, which 
should have been transacted in that November, 
1868, was carried over to the January term, 1869. 
At the last term of the attorney's official service, 
the business which was dispatched was immense, 
and the courts did not close until March ; it was 
at this term that the fees of the attorney ran up to 
;^ 1 5,000. The court and a great majority of the 
members of the bar, thought the attorney ought 
to be allowed to retain all the emoluments of his 
entire term ; therefore, at the close of the term, the 
late Hon. Thomas A. R. Nelson voiced the senti- 
ment of the bar and the court, (with two or three 
exceptions) in a memorial to Congress, asking that 
most august body to allow the attorney to retain 
all his earnings during his whole term of office. 
Here is the copy of the memorial : 



230 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

To the Honorable Senate and House of Representa- 
tives of the United States of America, now in Con- 
gress assembled : 

The memorial of , a citizen of Knox 

County, in the State of Tennessee, respectfully 
represents that on the nth day of March, 1865, 
he was duly commissioned as district attorney of 
the United States, for the eastern district of Ten- 
nessee, and held the office until the nth day of 
March, 1869, when he considers that his term of 
office expired, and since which time he has not 
felt authorized to assume or discharge the duties 
of said office. 

Your memorialist represents that during his 
term of service the duties of his office were far 
more complicated and laborious than had been 
previously performed by any district attorney 
in the State. During the late civil war, a large 
majority of the people of East Tennessee remained 
loyal to the government of the United States, and 
the jurors impaneled in the Circuit and District 
Courts were generally loyal men, and having 
been selected from most of the counties in East 
Tennessee, their knowlege, as to the state of 
affairs existing during the war, was quite extensive, 
and in consequence of this, a larger number of 
presentments and indictments was made than had 
ever been made in the same length of time or even 
in a succession of years in the judicial history of 
the State. More than six hundred presentments 
and indictments had been sent by the predecessor 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 23 I 

of your memorialist, and including the number 
sent by him, the aggregate number of present- 
ments and indictments was more than two thou- 
sand one hundred, and the number of informations 
in confiscation cases reached the aggregate of 
four hundred. 

Your memorialist attended to these cases in 
his own proper person and without calling upon 
the government of the United States to incur the 
expense of an assistant. As a consequence of the 
vast amount of business done in the courts, the 
fees and emoluments allowed *to your memorialist 
exceeded the sum of six thousand dollars, per 
provided for in the act approved 26th of Febru- 
ary, 1854, (10 Statues at Large, 165,) (Brightley's 
Dig., 277, 278.) In view of the laborious service 
rendered by your memorialist, and the extraor- 
dinary and unparalleled increase of business ; in 
view of the fact that it was performed without any 
authorized assistant, and more especially in view 
of the facts that, owing to the depreciation in the 
currency, and the large increase of taxes and the 
expenses of living, the maximum of six thousand 
dollars contemplated by the act of 1853 has not 
been paid in the currency contemplated by that 
act, and that your memorialist has not, in point 
of fact, received the amount intended. Your 
memorialist respectfully prays your honorable 
body to enact a statute, authorizing him to retain 
all the fees and emoluments which have accrued 
during his term of service, or if the same or any 



232 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

part thereof has been paid into the Treasury to 
authorize the same to be paid over to him, and as 
in duty bound your memoriahst will ever pray. 

The undersigned, being the presiding judge and 
a portion of the members of the bar, practicing in 
the Circuit and District Courts of the United 
States, at Knoxville, Tennessee, respectfully state 
that from our knowledge of the facts, we think the 
prayers of the foregoing memorial should be 
granted. 

March i6, 1869. 
Connelly F. Trigg, United States District Judge. 
Thomas A. R. Nelson. 
M. L. Hall, Clerk United States Court. 
John H. Crozier. 
Sam. T. Logan. 
James R. Cocke. 
J. H. Crozier, Jr. 
W. A. Henderson. 
Jos. M. Logan. 

D. D. Anderson. 

E. W. Crozier. 
Jas. L. Abernathy. 
T. R. Cornick. 

O. P. Temple. 
W. P. Washburn. 

From the general terms of this paper, it might 
be inferred that the attorney did not claim the 
whole amount of confiscation allowances, but 
no question had been started as to his right to 
these allowances. The main reason for the me- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 233 

morial was that nearly the whole number of cases 
disposed of at the January term, 1869, were other 
than confiscation cases, and the rule of July 17th, 
1862, as to confiscation cases, would not apply, 
and as there were vastly more of them than would 
make. up the six thousand per annum, under the 
act of the 26th of February, 1853, the action of 
Congress was needful to authorize the attorney to 
collect and retain the excess, for most of the fees 
thus allowed by the court in the January term, 
1869, were taxed against the United States under 
the direction of Johnson's administration. The 
volume of business done at that January term, 
1869, was so great the courts held open to near 
the close of the attorney's official term, so that 
it was impossible to get up the report of all the 
cases in which action had been taken at that term, 
together with the emolument returns, before the 
attorney's term expired. 

It will be remembered that the accounts of the 
attorney, which should have been settled every 
half year, at the department at Washington, upon 
his reports and emolument returns, which were all 
regularly made during the years 1865, 1866, 1867, 
1868, had not been, nor has one of them been 
settled ; the material for such settlement being in 
the hands of the officers at the Interior and Treas- 
ury Departments. The law requires such settle- 
ment to be made every half year, at the Depart- 
ment of the Interior, and the Secretary of the In- 
terior was required to notify the attorney of any 
20 



234 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

excess over his personal compensation and office 
expenses shown by the account, and to require 
him to pay such excess into a pubHc repository of 
United States funds ; this was not done during the 
attorney's whole term. 

The memorial was sent to the Hon. Horace 
Maynard, then in Congress, who offered it in the 
House of Representatives, and it was referred to 
the Judicial Committee of that House and referred 
again and again to the same Committee, where it 
has been pending for fourteen years and never 
acted on. At the close of the courts in March, 
1869, the attorney employed Henry M. Aiken, 
Esq. , afterwards clerk of the United States Circuit 
Court of said district, to make from the records of 
the court accounts showing the amounts due 
the attorney in each court and in the various 
classes of business, which he executed faithfully. 
These accounts, six in number, were certified by 
the clerk of the court to be correct. These showed, 
first, the cases disposed of at the January term, 
1869, in which fees, were allowed the attorney 
taxed against the United States ; second, the class 
of fees for which the United States were liable, 
but had not been received by the attorney, such 
as acquittals by jury trial, nolle proseqtds^ dismissals, 
abatements and insolvencies. These transcripts, 
together with the report and emolument returns, 
made every six months, showed every case in the 
courts in which the United States was a party dur- 
ing the attorney's official service, and therefore all 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 235 

that was necessary to settle his whole account. 
Thus the matter stood from March, 1869, until 
May, 1870 The attorney heard nothing of his 
account from Washington, and went in May to 
that famous place to close up his account. The 
memorial to Congress had not been acted on, but 
the lawyer thought and still thinks the United 
States largely indebted to him, whether the prayer 
of the memorial shall be granted or not. 

Reaching Washington in May, 1870, he re- 
paired to the Treasury Department, that greatest 
centre of attraction, and not being able to reach 
the head centre except by long lines of red tape, 
he interviewed some of the subalterns. A Mr. 
Smith, a very clever clerk, introduced the lawyer 
into that portion of the establishment, where every 
man's grist must be first ground, called the comp- 
troller's office. To the persons in charge, the 
lawyer presented a respectful request for a state- 
ment of his account in view of settlement. In the 
course of the colloquy which followed, the lawyer 
was told for the first time, he must account for con- 
fiscation allowances. He denied his obligation to 
do so, and cited the eighth section of the act of 
17th of July, 1862, to which it was answered that 
the act of the 27th of June, 1864, had changed the 
law. The lawyer had never heard of this act and 
promised to examine it ; he did so and was per- 
fectly satisfied that Congress did not intend, 
by that act, to touch the subject of confiscation in 
the insurrecting districts; and, under the impression 



236 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

that the department had put a false construction 
upon this act (which he beheves now as fully as 
then), he refused to settle upon any such basis. 
The lawyer consulted the district attorney for the 
District of Columbia as to the act of the 27th of 
June, 1864, and his action under it. That officer 
was assuredly under its operation, if construed to 
apply to confiscation. The attorney stated that 
he had not reported his confiscation cases, though 
the department had notified him to do so, and if 
the department thought he was bound to report, 
the courts were open. The Interior Department 
continued to be interior, as nothing further ap- 
peared upon the surface. The ground taken by 
the attorney was that the act of the 27th of June, 
1864, did not touch the eighth section of the act 
of the 17th of July, 1862. If this view of the law 
was correct, and the Government seemed to be 
afraid to test it, as no step was taken against the 
attorney, the lawyer was better satisfied that it did 
not apply to insurrectionary districts. 

While in Washington, on that occasion, the law- 
yer was invited to dine with the Hon. Return J. 
Meigs, then clerk of the Supreme Court of the 
District of Columbia, an honorable, learned and 
worthy man from Tennessee, and against whom it 
is believed Trumbull and Otto tried the act of the 
27th of June, 1864, aforesaid. To put the matter 
to a practical test the lawyer procured the clerk, 
Mr. Smith, to make out an account against the 
United States from some of the transcripts which 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 237 

was presented at the comptroller's office. The ac- 
count was rejected because it did not cover the at- 
torney's whole claim, and yet, as will be seen 
hereafter, the same office which rejected said ac- 
count on that ground, actually made out an ac- 
count against the lawyer covering only three years 
of his term, of while more will be said hereafter. 
In the lawyer's last interview in the comptroller's 
office, there being a radical difference of opinion 
as to the basis and mode of settlement, it was 
agreed to wait the action of Congress upon the 
lawyer's memorial, and the officer gave some coun- 
sel as to the form of the act or resolution to be 
passed upon memorials to avoid future misunder- 
standings, which were communicated to Mr. 
Maynard, who drew up a form in accordance to 
such instruction, and the lawyer left Washington 
with the loss of two hundred dollars of expenses. 



238 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Mr. Maynard thought the prayer of the memor- 
ial should be granted, and did what was proper 
in his circumstances to procure action upon it by 
the Congress, for he recognized a clear distinction 
between a Congressman and a claim agent. As the 
lawyer while district attorney had received nothing 
from the Treasury except his salary and per diem, 
in the aggregate reaching the sum of some two 
thousand dollars, having waited for his fees until 
collected from departments and paid over by the 
clerk by order of the court, thus saving the gov- 
ernment the payment of his main compensation; 
and endorsed as the memorial was he could not 
doubt that its prayer would be granted. Thus 
the matter stood from May, 1870, to March, 1876, 
nearly six years. About the latter period some 
severe criticisms were made in Congress of the 
management of the Treasury Department under 
the rule of General Bristow, which seemed to 
quicken the pulse of the comptroller, and in that 
month of March, 1876, that officer sent the lawyer, 
without any previous notice, the following ac- 
counts: 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 239 

To amount of official emoluments carried Dr, 

in the following years: — 
March 28 to June 30, 1865, • • ^1,876 89 
July I to December 31, 1865, . . 4,471 00 

^6,367 82 

^7,302 50 



January I to June 30, 1866, . . 6,892 50 

July I to December 31, 1866, . . 410 00 



January i to June 30, 1867, . . 9,797 25 

July I to December 31, 1867, . . 745 00 



Dollars, 




. 






24,212 


— |5io, 
64 


.542 


25 


Ey amount of compensation 


an 


d expe 


nses 










in the following years: — 












Cr. 






Personal compensation March 


28 


to 


De- 










cember 31, 1865, • 




. 






34,586 


30 






Office expenses, same period, 




. 




. 


119 


90 







Personal compensation, 1866, . . $6,000 00 

Office expenses, ..... 254 50 

Personal compensation, 1867, . . $6 oco OD 

Office expenses, . . . . . 154 00 



^4,706 20 

$6,254 50 

$6,154 00 

Balance due the United States, . $7,097 94 

Dollars, . . . . . . 24 212 64 

Will any one wonder that the lawyer was both 
surprised and indignant upon the receipt of this 
account, accompanied with a demand that this al- 
leged balance be paid into a public depository? 
He made no reply to it except to state that his 
memorial to Congress had not been acted on, and 
this he did because he regarded this proceeding 
as a breach of the agreement before referred to 
and an outrage upon his rights. An inspection of 
this account shows that less than three years of 
his whole term was embraced in it. and from his 



240 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

emoluments, returns and accounts filed in the de- 
partment and full notice of his claim, was grossly 
wrong. In this account presented were included 
eight thousand dollars of confiscation allowances, 
which really belonged to the attorney, and by this 
account the department attempted to compel him 
to pay into the Treasury of the United States 
money that belonged to himself. Under the con- 
viction that the court would hold that the attorney 
had the right to these allowances, because the 
same judge who made them to the attorney and 
who had throughout his term held that they be- 
longed to the attorney, would try the cause, the 
lawyer's apprehension of trouble from it was not 
serious. Within a few weeks George Andrews, 
Esq., was instructed to sue, which he did with 
reasonable dispatch. In the meantime, the lawyer 
had heard nothing more from Washington. The 
action was for excess of emoluments. The lawyer 
filed the plea of non-assumpset. Quite a corres- 
pondence subsequently occurred between the law- 
yer and the officers at Washington, but no modifi- 
cation or change of the account could be procured. 
The trial came on — the same judge presiding. The 
case turned upon the construction of the act of the 
27th of June, 1864, aforesaid, and such was the 
eloquence, the skillful argument and persuasive- 
ness of the district attorney — George Andrews, 
Esq. — and his assistant, H. H. Pettybone, Esq., 
against the long and impatient argument of the 
defendant, the lawyer (who attended to his own 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 24I 

case), that the honorable judge's views became 
confused, and charged the jury against the defend- 
ant, taking care, however, to state that he had 
told the lawyer during his term that he was en- 
titled to retain those confiscation allowances; that 
he had never seen the act of the 27th of June, 
1864 ; that he regarded its interpretation as difficult, 
but would hold for the government, and that the 
defendant should take it to the Supreme Court of 
the United States, for there it ought to go. 

Many collateral points were made in the progress 
of the trial, which will be more fully given here- 
after. The jury returned a verdict against the de- 
fendant upon the account. The lawyer entered a 
rule for a new trial which was continued for sev- 
eral terms. 
21 



242 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

In the meantime, the lawyer wrote a letter to a 
member in Congress from his district as follows : 

December 20, 1879. 

Dear Sir: I regret I could not see and con- 
verse with you freely in regard to my embroglio 
with the United States. I desire you to under- 
stand the case upon its merits. You are not 
aware, perhaps, that I have held the office of 
United States Attorney for this district twice ; 
first under President Tyler, second under Presi- 
dent Lincoln. My last appointment was in 
March, 1865, before the close^of the Rebellion. 
I held the place until Major Camp's appointment 
in the spring of 1869, and was assured by Senator 
Brownlow of my reappointment if I desired or 
would accept it. No complaint was ever made 
(so far as I know) of my administration, although, 
as you know, I had an enormous pressure of busi- 
ness upon me, in all which time — from March, 
1865, to the end of my service — I had no assistant, 
except in the solitary case of the United States vs. 
Harris and others, known as the Chattanooga 
Warehouse case, in which I procured Judge Key, 
the Hon. P. M. G., and in which we obtained 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 243 

jud^^ments against three parties for the aggregate 
sum of ;^i 10,000. 

In my first services under President Tyler (in 
the year 1841), the marshal of the district paid my 
per diem and the Treasury Department my salary; 
fees earned collected from the defendant when 
possible and paid out of the registry of the court. 
The act of February 26, 1863, regulating fees, 
etc., and limiting the compensation to ;^6,ooo per 
annum contains no direction as to how these fees 
are to be received — whether according to the 
mode of 1841 or directly from the Treasury. I 
had no special instructions upon this point, and in 
my last service acted upon the rule of 1841, con- 
sequently received nothing from the Treasury 
during my term save my salary and per diem 
during the last service. All the money received 
by me in 1865 to 1869 inclusive was collected 
from defendants, except ;^ioo sent me by Captain 
Whiteman in the Chattanooga cemetery case, in 
which I saved the United States ;^25,ooo, as Judge 
Key knows. The Treasury Department made no 
requisition upon me to make annual settlements 
other than the semi-annual emolument returns, 
which I made regularly, embracing every class 
and item of fees and allowances. This failure to 
make annual settlements has been the cause of all 
my trouble with the government, because such 
settlements the first year would have shown what 
I was allowed to retain as my compensation ; for 
the act of the 17th of July, 1862, entitled ''An 



244 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

act to suppress rebellion, punish treason and con- 
fiscate the property of rebels, by the terms of the 
eighth section," authorized the District Courts to 
allow the officers of the courts such compensation 
as such courts might deem proper without limita- 
tion otherwise ; and the Attorney General, Edward 
Bates, in his circular letter addressed to such 
officers on the 8th of January, 1863, instructing 
them as to the mode of proceeding and their duties 
under such said act, stated that it was a 7iezv class 
of business, and Congress had seen proper to sub- 
mit their compensation to the discretion of the 
courts. There were about four hundred confisca- 
tion cases under my charge and the allowances 
ran up to between nine and ten thousand dollars 
in them under the act aforesaid and the letter of 
the Attorney General, I supposed, and the courts 
supposed, I was entitled to retain all these allow- 
ances, for the act of the 27th of June, 1864, to 
regulate the fees of the officers of the Supreme 
Court of the District of Columbia and other pur- 
poses was utterly unknown to myself and the 
court, and the question of law presented in the 
Case against me is, Does the second section of the 
act of 27th of July, 1864, aforesaid, repeal the 
eighth section of the act of 17th of July, 1862, 
aforesaid? It is not pretended that the second 
section: of the act of 27th of June, 1864, repeals 
such eighth section of the act of 1862, in terms, 
but that the act of 1864, aforesaid, limits the com- 
pensation under the act of 1862 to $6,000, the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 245 

maximum under the act of 1853. I insist that 
act of 1864 appHes to the District of Columbia 
alone; but whether right or wrong in this, of 
which there may be doubt, the government al- 
lowed me to take and use these confiscation allow- 
ances for the whole of my term as my own (and 
for more than a year after my term expired), and 
until I had transcripts made from the records of 
the courts showing that my total earnings for the 
four years of my service amounted to ;^40, 741 
(forty thousand, seven hundred and forty-one dol- 
lars), and that I had received about ;^ 18. 100, and 
about ;^8,ooo of which were confiscation allow- 
ances; and going to Washington in May, 1870, 
no account having been presented of my status 
with the United States by the department to settle 
with the government, was for the first time met 
by the Comptroller with the demand for my con- 
fiscation allowances under the act of 26th of Feb- 
ruary, 1863, and was referred to the second sec- 
tion of the act of 27th of June, 1864, aforesaid, 
which was the first intimation I ever had of the 
act as in any wise applicable to my account. If 
the department had settled my account annually 
this demand would have been made at the close 
of my first year, and a construction of the act 
aforesaid would have followed and I would not 
have been left in the dark (if I was in the dark) 
about how much I should retain. It was no fault 
of mine that these settlements were not made. I 
made all the reports and returns except the frac- 



246 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

tion of the year of 1869, required by the law and 
the department, including my confiscation allow- 
ances. These last were reported not to be settled 
at the department as to my right to them, but be- 
cause I was required to report the suits brought 
and how they were disposed of, I thought it my 
duty to state how these confiscation cases resulted, 
as in event of condemnation the property would 
belong to the United States, and if a sale followed 
yielding more than the costs and allowances, the 
surplus was to be used by the United States foi" 
suppressing the Rebellion. The United States 
had a right to know all about these cases. Hav 
ing made due returns to the department of my of- 
ficial business, it was the duty of the department 
to make annual settlement of my account and to 
furnish me a copy ; by failing to do this (if the act 
of 1864 be against me) I was entrapped into this 
present embroglio and trouble. 

In the year 1868 an act passed changing the 
time of holding the courts in this district from 
May and November to January and July; as a 
consequence there was no November term of 
the courts in 1868, and the large business I had 
ready for the November term of 1868 was carried 
over to the January term of 1 869. At this last term 
an immense amount of business was done, and my 
fees and allowances at that term ran to over 
;^ 14, 000. At the close of the term (my four years 
being nearly out). Judge Thomas A. R, Nelson, 
deceased, drew the memorial to Congress which 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 24/ 

is now before the Judicial Committee, signed, as 
you see, by the Judge and officers and a large 
majority of the members of the bar, and presented 
to Congress by the Hon. Horace Maynard in 
1869. This memorial was intended to cover these 
fees and allowances at the January term of 1869, 
as a small part of them were confiscation cases and 
they were dismissed by order of the Attorney 
General Speed. This memorial was before the 
Judicial Committee when I went to Washington 
in May, 1870, and as I did not believe (nor do I 
yet believe) that Congress intended the second 
section of the act of 1864, aforesaid, to apply to 
the district which had been recovered from the 
Rebels (the war still going on) or indeed to any 
but that of the District of Columbia, for I had 
learned the history of the act of 1864, aforesaid, 
and its objects from the clerk of the Supreme 
Court and the district attorney for the District of 
Columbia, I refused to settle with the comptroller 
on his basis, aforesaid. I understood it then to 
be agreed that my account should remain open 
until Congress acted upon my memorial; and Mr. 
McDonald, of the comptroller's Office, with whom 
I communicated upon the point, suggested some 
special points to be inserted in the act or resolu- 
tion upon my memorial. Thus the matter rested 
from May, 1870, until March, 1876, or about the 
time when the Democrats began to threaten 
Secretary Bristow's department, when I was in- 
formed by the comptroller (not McDonald) that 



248 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

my account had been made out for three years of 
my term and a balance struck against me of $'] , 100, 
and that I must pay it over to the proper deposi- 
tory. This was the first that I had heard ot my ac- 
count as made out, and that for three years. Sur- 
prised, I wrote to the comptroller that Congress 
had not acted upon my memorial, and it was still 
before the Judicial Committee of the House. 

Without any reply to my letter the account was 
immediately sent to the district attorney, Andrews, 
and suit at once brought against me. Observe, 
suit for three years only, including in the account 
my confiscation allowances which amounted to 
more than ;^8,ooo, nearly ;^ 1,000 more than was 
claimed to be due the United States, and utterly 
ignoring the years 1868-9 ^^ about ;^ 15,000. It 
is attempted to excuse this partial settlement of 
my account at the department, by saying that I 
made no emolument return in 1869. To this I 
reply that I have made all my emolument returns 
for the years 1865, 1866, 1867, 1868 ; my term ex- 
pired in March, 1869. At the January term, 1869, 
the business was so voluminous that I could not 
make such emolument returns before my term ex- 
pired, but I procured H. M. Aiken, Esq., to 
make six transcripts from the records of the courts, 
showing all the unreported business and earnings 
to the close of my term, for which I paid him 
i^ioo, which transcripts I took to Washington in 
May, 1870, to settle as aforesaid, and these tran- 
scripts are now in the comptroller's office at Wash- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 249 

ington. Instead of calling upon me for these tran- 
scripts, two of which were in the comptroller's 
office when the account was made out for three 
years, but not noticed in the account, the same 
was sent to the district attorney without giving 
me any chance to present my account to the de- 
partment and when the suit was tried, the fact 
that my account had not been presented at the 
department was held to exclude my account, and 
judgment was taken upon the account for three 
years, as made by the department. Observe, after 
the suit was brought, I had applied to the depart- 
ment to have my account corrected, and sent back 
to Washington four of the transcripts (two being 
there already), which transcripts showed the actual 
facts from the records and all that was really need- 
ful to show the account unjust outside of the con- 
fiscation allowances, but I was informed no notice 
could be taken of these transcripts, though prop- 
erly certified as copies from the records by the 
clerk and judge with the seal of the court. I then 
revised the records and made out an emolument 
return for the including fraction of the year, 1869, 
and an account from the Circuit Court and one 
from the District Court and sent them to the comp- 
troller, but the answer was through the district 
attorney that I did not seem to understand what 
was required, and the matter was left in the hands 
of the honorable attorney, but the judgment had 
been taken before this emolument return and 
these last accounts were sent. The transcripts 



250 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

and an account, substantially like the last, with 
small variations, had been sent before judgment 
was taken. Upon the return of the verdict of the 
jury, I entered a motion for a new trial, and the 
case now stands upon this motion. I claim in law 
and equity: 

1. That I am entitled to retain all the allowances 
made me by the court in confiscation cases. 

2. That I had not received the amount charged 
against me in the account sued on, as aforesaid. 

3. That I am entitled to large credits for the 
years 1868-9, which are not noticed in the account 
sued on, as that only covers three years. 

4. That I have an equitable claim to $6,000, 
which I would have earned if the change had not 
been made in the time of holding the courts in 
1868, by which I lost one term and caused the 
large accumulation of business over to the January 
term, 1869. 

What is the gravamen of this whole thing? See, 
my gross emoluments for four years was the sum 
of;$40, 741 ; of this sum, as I understand the ac- 
count from the records of the courts, I have re- 
ceived 1^18,172, or about that, of which last sum 
about $8,000 are confiscation allowances under the 
act of July 17, 1862, aforesaid. If I am entitled 
to retain this last sum, as I believe I am (and as 
the court which allowed them thought I was, dur- 
ing my whole term), then my receipts under the 
act of 1853 would be less than half the maximum 
allowed by that act, but if I am obliged to account 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2$ I 

for these confiscation allowances under the act of 
1853, then I have not received as much by several 
thousand dollars as the act of 1853 allowed me to 
retain for the four years of my service. How then 
does the comptroller bring me in debt ^7,000? 
Thus he charges me with emoluments reported for 
1865, 1866, 1867, ;^24,ooo, and says I must go be- 
hind or before — at all events outside of — my emolu- 
ment returns, and prove the negative that I not 
only did not receive them, but I must prove the 
reason I did not receive them, and after the lapse 
of six years from the close of my term, I am re- 
quired, if I understand what the comptroller re- 
quires (which by the way he seems to think I do 
not), to report anew every case in which I have 
not received the fees or allowances, and the reason 
why my emolument returns for 1865, 1866, 1867, 

1868, show all the monies received by me during 
these years, and that for the fraction of the year 

1869, shows those received by me in that fraction; 
but while the comptroller uses these returns to 
charge me, he does not allow them to discharge 
me, though made under oath. But, suppose I 
had received the 1^24,000, it would have been no 
more than I was allowed to retain as compensation 
under the act of 1853. If I am required to pay 
back ;^7,ooo of it, it would leave me ;^ 17, 000 as 
my own, out of ;^40,ooo earned ; but suppose I 
have received only ;^ 18, 000, and must pay back 
$'j,ooo, this would leave me ;^ 11,000, as my com- 
pensation for earning ;^40,ooo ; suppose I am en- 



252 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

titled to my confiscation allowances under the law, 
but the comptroller refuses to allow me to retain 
them, and I am forced to pay back the $j,ooo, 
;^8,ooo and ;^7,ooo would be ;^i5,ooo out of the 
;^24,ooo, a total loss, to say nothing of $16,000 
earned in 1868-9 ^"^ ^^^ received. 

I have made this lengthy statement that you may 
understand the true nature of the case. I have not 
given arithmetical exactness in the various sums 
stated, but only substantial accuracy. 

I desire that Congress shall do one of two things 
at the present session, viz.: 

1. Grant the prayer of my memorial, or, 

2. Pass an act or resolution, allowing me to take 
an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United 
States (if a new trial is refused, or a judgment 
fine shall be taken against me) without security ; I 
am unable to give security. The judge who tried 
the case last January said it ought to go to the 
Supreme Court. I think you will be of the same 
opinion. Respectfully, 



The lawyer wrote repeatedly to the comptroller 
and the Secretary of Treasury, but found no favor 
from those officials. He then employed an at- 
torney, to whom the comptroller shortly wrote that 
the judgment might be credited with the sum 
of ;^ 1, 742. 00, if the lawyer would swear that it 
could not be collected. This was not done. In- 
deed, no opportunity was offered the lawyer to 
make such an affidavit, if he had been willing to 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 253 

do SO, which, however, he would not have done, 
because the demand was unreasonable and simply 
absurd upon its face. The lawyer, as district at- 
torney, never was bound to do more than to see 
that executions were issued to the marshal and 
property returned. It was the marshal's business 
to know whether the same could be collected or 
not. The sitting Congressman had been joking 
about the administration of Attorney Andrews, 
who retired from that position and was succeeded 
by one Wheeler ; the said Andrews only giving 
him aid and comfort. The letter from the comp- 
troller, in relation to the credit aforesaid, reached 
the lawyer's attorney through this new attorney 
Wheeler. The term of the court in which the 
rule for a new trial was to be disposed of arrived, 
then the case would be taken up and the next Fri- 
day was set, of which the lawyer informed his at- 
torney ; on that Friday the lawyer again attended 
and interviewed the new attorney, also Attorney 
Andrews, and the next Monday was set. The 
lawyer attended prepared to argue the case, but 
the court being otherwise occupied, could not take 
It up. The lawyer living three miles in the coun- 
try, and being over seventy years of age, requested 
his attorney to watch the case and notify him of the 
time it would be taken up, as he intended to make 
an argument himself. Toward the close of the 
week and hearing nothing from the case, he again 
went to the court and inquired of his attorney in 
relation to the case. He informed him nothing 



254 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

had been done. Immediately after the noon re- 
cess, the lawyer having some business in the Su- 
preme Court Clerk's Office, requested his attorney 
to go up to the Federal Court and apply to the court 
to know what time the case would be called and to 
fix a day that the lawyer might attend ; and his at- 
torney went, and in open court and in the presence 
of the district attorney told the court that the law- 
yer was ready for the case and wanted to know 
when it would be taken up, to which the court re' 
plied : It would not be called again unless es- 
pecially pressed by the district attorney. The 
district attorney making no response, the lawyer's 
attorney supposed it would go over to the next 
term and reported to the lawyer. A month or less 
afterward, the lawyer was utterly astonished by re- 
ceipt of a letter from the marshal, informing him 
that he had an execution against him upon the 
judgment in favor of the United States. The law- 
yer immediately repaired to the city and found it 
true. The lawyer's attorney was at that time at 
a neighboring court and wrote to the lawyer the 
following letter : 

RuTLEDGE, December 28,. 1880. 
Dear Sir : 

Your letter Avas forwarded here ; the condition 
of the case was exactly as I told you at my last 
connexion with it. 

I afterwards heard that Judge Key came up on 
some adjourned day for the purpose of signing 
the record, when Wheeler pressed the case and 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 255 

judgment was pronounced without argument or 
knowledge on my part. I had before notified the 
judge in open court and in the presence of 
Wheeler that we were ready for trial at any time, 
only I wanted you present at the hearing. I don't 
know what else we can do. The thing is unjust. 
Yours respectfully, 

Wm. a. Henderson. 
On return of Wm. Henderson from Rutledge, 
the lawyer called upon and received confirmation 
of the facts already stated, and that when the 
court informed him that the case would not be 
called again (as before stated), and that the judge 
had left Knoxville for Chattanooga, the attorney 
supposed that the term was practically close and 
that the judge would only return to sign the min- 
utes. When he did return and Wheeler pressed 
the case, notwithstanding the judge knew that the 
lawyer and attorney were ready to hear the cause 
and that neither of them were present or were in- 
formed of the present proceeding, the rule was 
discharged and the judgment left intact. The law- 
yer took no further notice of this judgment be- 
cause he had been cut off by his want of knowledge 
of the proceeding, the time having elapsed and be- 
cause he was utterly unwilling to submit anything 
further to the same court. 



256 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

It will be seen from the foregoing statement 
that the lawyer had no opportunity to present his 
printed arguments upon the rule for a new trial, 
and here offers it for the information of the court 
and country : 

United States I ^^^j^^ on the case, etc. Briefs 
I for Defendant. 

There are several counts in the declaration, to 
which the plea of non assumpsit has been filed. 
The demand for emoluments of the office of United 
States Attorney for East Tennessee, said to be im- 
properly retained by defendant of about ;^7,ooo. 

The defense rests, first, Upon the ground that 
there is no law which requires the defendant to ac- 
count for allowances made to him by the District 
Court in confiscation cases under the eighth sec- 
tion of the act of the 17th of July, 1862, entitled: 
"An act to suppress insurrection, punish treason 
and rebellion, and confiscate the property of 
Rebels," (see Statutes at Large, 12th vol., page 
591), and that more than ;^8,ooo of the ;^24,ocmd 
account sued on, are such allowances which show 
the account to be erroneous. Second, If there be 
such law, then the account is erroneous because it 
22 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2^J 

embraces only three years of defendant's term, 
whereas, defendant served four years and no ac- 
count was made out until nearly seven years after 
the expiration of defendant's term, and the large 
earnings of the fourth year were ignored. Third, 
Defendant is entitled to large credits for fees taxed 
against the United States, and defendant, respec- 
tively, in several classes of cases disposed of in the 
years of 1865-6-7, viz., acquittals by July trials, 
nol proseqiiis, dismissals, insolvencies and abate- 
ments of which no notice was taken in making up 
the account sued on. Fourth, The United States 
have charged in the account sued on, all the earn- 
ings of defendant in the years 1865-6-7, as though 
received by him on the evidence of his'emolument 
returns, yet those emolument returns show the 
defendant did not receive more than ^17,684, 
;^6,378 less than the account sued on. Thus these 
emolument returns are made to charge, but not to 
discharge defendant. There are some other matters 
which incidentally fall into the argument. 

The first question is : What is the laAV govern- 
ing the accountability of officers of the courts in 
confiscation cases under the sixth, seventh and 
eighth section of the act of 17th of July, 1862, 
above stated? That act was construed on the 8th 
of January, 1863, by Hon. Edward Bates, at that 
date Attorney General, in a circular letter to dis- 
trict attorneys and marshals, relating to proceed- 
ings under the act of Congress for confiscation 
aforesaid (see certified copy of circular here shown). 



258 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

The authority conferred upon the courts to allow 
compensation to officers at discretion, implied the 
right of such officers to retain such allowances, no 
scale of fees having been provided for this new 
class of business. This discretionary power of the 
courts was doubtlessly given to stimulate such 
officers to the greatest diligence and activity in co- 
operating with the military power to suppress the 
insurrection. This law was to be executed chiefly 
in the districts in Rebellion, such proceedings fol- 
lowing close upon military occupation with riots 
and responsibilities to the officers peculiar to the 
condition of such districts, made it eminently 
proper to leave to the sound discretion of the 
courts, the whole subject ot official recompense. 
To seize Rebels' property and thereby deprive 
them of the means of protracting the war, was the 
purpose of Congress. Treason has always been 
punishable by process in the Circuit Courts, but 
this Rebellion, so gigantic in its proportions, in- 
volving fifteen States, demanded extraordinary 
measures for its suppression. Forfeitures and pen- 
alties were by the act of Congress superadded, 
which could only be enforced in the district where 
the offenses were committed, or property found, 
and only in the District Courts by proceedings 
analogous to admiralty, or revenue cases, or proceed- 
ing in rem. The objects of the law were well un- 
derstood by the honorable Attorney General Bates 
and district attorneys and marshals would, from 
the law itself and the circular .letter aforesaid, un- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 259 

derstand that the allowances made by the courts 
were independent acts of said courts, acting at 
their discretion and limited by no legal rules as to 
maximum or minimum compensation. The special 
circumstances of each case, known by judicial in- 
vestigation in the extraordinary condition of the 
country, no other tribunal or authority could so 
justly determine what each officer should have in 
the particular case. The circumstances under 
which a law is passed have direct relation to the 
intention of the law-maker and the meaning of the 
law. The act of February 26th, 1853, was passed 
at a time of profound peace, and breaches of na- 
tional laws were comparatively rare, and the neces- 
saries of life cheap. The business in the districts 
with few exceptions was small, and few cases 
presented any special novelties. The enforcemxCnt 
of penalties and forfeitures against and in the 
midst of populations only restrained from violence;; 
and bloodshed by military force were wholly un- 
known. Under these circumstances the act of 
February 26th, 1853, was passed, by which com- 
pensation to district attorney and marshals was 
limited $6,000 per annum, to enable each officer to 
know how much he could retain of his earnings and 
the court to know how much each officer should 
have in each case ; the legislature fixed a scale of 
fees sliding upward in no case beyond fifty dollars. 
Here were mile-marks and finger-boards by which 
the courts and officers were to shape their course. 
Contrast this act of 1853 and its attendant circum- 



260 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

Stances with the act of 1862, of Congress, and its 
surroundings and all sufficient reasons appear for 
the interpretation of the act of the 17th July, 
1862, by Attorney General Bates, as shown in his 
circular aforesaid. (A word or two here aiigiiendo 
of defendant's personal experience bearing on this 
point.) One month previous to defendant's ap- 
pointment by President Lincoln, on his way to 
Knoxville, under the protection of a woman of 
Rebel sympathies, defendant was arrested, searched 
and his horse taken from him by Rebel soldiers. 
Two months after defendant's appointment he was 
obliged to depend upon military protection to re- 
turn to Rogersville, in Hawkins County, to see 
his family which had been left behind in defend- 
ant's escape. The courts will take judicial knowl- 
edge of the war of the Rebellion and the condition 
of the country at the close. The public mind 
fevered by contending passions, some raging, some 
trembling with fear, life cheap, living costly be- 
yond precedent in the insurrectionary districts, 
courts crowded almost to suffocation, money de- 
preciated to half its normal value ; the courts and 
officers would not doubt the correctness of At- 
torney General Bates' construction of the law. It 
has been observed that no scale of fees or rule of 
compensation to officers of the courts was fixed 
by the act of 1862, other than the sound discre- 
tion of the courts, and there were reasons operat- 
ing on the mind of Congress to remove restrictions 
upon the powers of the courts in allowing com- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 26 1 

pensation to their officers, leaving it to the court's 
discretion. Surely the reason would exist to take 
off the restriction upon the officers as to the 
amount they might retain, but accountability for 
confiscation allowances under the act of 1862, 
aforesaid, is denied upon another ground. Such 
allowances were not drawn from the Treasury and 
never were the property of the United States. 
The statute aforesaid, section 7th, 1862, provided, 
when the property seized, was condemned, it 
should become the property of the United States, 
and if not condemned, how did it stand ? (See 
the United States vs. Kline, Wallace Rept. p.) 
As it was not forfeited it remaimed the property 
of the original owner. What claim had the U. S. 
on it ? None ; unless under technical rule in ad- 
miralty there was probable cause for the seizure. 
The court declares there was probable cause and 
under the power conferred by the eighth section 
of said act of 1862, allows such fees and charges 
of their officers as shall be reasonable and proper 
in the premises. Here express power is given to 
to the courts not to adjudge costs generally, but 
to allow such fees and charges of these officers, 
etc. (The very words of the law manifestly ex- 
clude the idea of a maximum or minimum annual 
compensation.) In the event of condemnation, 
it being a proceeding en rem, the property was for- 
feited and became the property of the United 
States and as such, under the seventh section of 
said act of '62, it was to be sold and the proceeds 



262 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

paid into the Treasury of the United States, but 
if not condemned, then the act contemplated that 
the officers who had incurred expense, labor and 
risk, should be paid out of the property seized, 
upon proof of probable cause of seizure. Congress 
looked at the proceeding en rem and made it an- 
alogous to admiralty cases that if not condemned 
and forfeited, if probable cause were proven, the 
thing seized should be held until the officers were 
paid, therefore, no provision was made for the pay- 
ment of such officers when the property was not 
forfeited, condemned and no probable cause was 
shown. This shows the great responsibility cast 
upon district attorneys whose compensation mani- 
festly depended upon condemnation or probable 
cause, there being no law for the payment of such 
fees and charges by the United States in the event 
of no condemnation, or probable cause, and the 
lien upon the thing seized existed only for the 
benefit of the officers upon the probable cause ; 
under the act aforesaid the United States had no 
real interest in the subject. The mere form of en- 
forcing the lien by the court does not alter the 
case. Upon the former trial of this cause, this 
construction of the act of 17th of July, 1862, by 
Attorney General Bates, was not denied, but it was 
insisted that the act of the 27th of June, 1864, 
(see vol. 14th, Statutes at Large, page), en- 
titled : '*An Act to Regulate the Fees of the Clerk 
of the Supreme Court, District Attorney and 
Marshal of the District of Columbia, and for Other 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 263 

Purposes," does deny the right of any district at- 
torney or marshal to retain more than $6,000 per 
annum for its personal compensation, no matter 
from what source derived and the question is : 
" Did the statute apply to the insurrectionary dis- 
trict at the date of its passage, the 27th of June, 
1864?" Blackstone says : ** The will of the law- 
maker is to be interpreted by the most natural and 
probable signs, the context, the subject matter, 
the effects and consequences, and the spirit and 
the reason of the law." Had the spirit or reason 
of the law of the 17th of July, 1862, passed away 
on the 27th of June, 1864? Was the government 
less anxious to suppress the insurrection or wish 
to cool the zeal of the officers of the court, or 
abate their activity in the execution of law? 
Stronger reasons did exist in June, 1864, to stimu- 
late such action than in 1862. Is there anything 
in the subject matter, effects, consequences, spirit 
or reason of the act of 1864, which implies an in- 
tention to repeal, modify or construe the eighth 
section of the act of the 17th of July, 1862? Upon 
careful consideration it must be apparent to every 
intelligent mind that in the passage of the act of 
the 27th of June, 1862, Congress had not the act 
of the 17th of July, 1862, in its mind at all, and if 
Attorney General Bates gave that act of 1862 the 
right construction, then no reason can be assigned 
why Congress should have modified it, and if such 
had been the intention of Congress, is it rational 
to suppose that so important an act as the chief 



264 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

confiscation act and a leading war measure would 
not have been mentioned ? By its terms, revenue 
cases were specially excepted. Was there greater 
reason for excepting these than confiscation cases ? 
Revenue cases might occur in the District of 
Columbia, which was not in insurrection ; confis- 
cation cases would rarely, if ever, occur there. 
The caption of the act of the 27th of June, 1864, 
would impress the mind that it was an act ex- 
clusively appHcable to the District of Columbia, 
and that such was its intent is plainly shown by 
the caption and the terms of the act. The cause 
of its passage stated to defendant, in Washington, 
in 1870, is not in proof and therefore not here 
stated. The first section of said act applies en- 
tirely to the clerk of the Supreme Court and the 
district; the second section declares that no dis- 
trict attorney or marshal of the United States 
shall, etc. These are the only words in the statute 
about which there is any dispute as to the extent 
of its application. Did Congress mean by the 
phrase district attorney or marshal of the United 
States to include South Carolina, Georgia, Ten- 
nessee, etc., all then in open and flagrant war 
with the United States, viz., in June, 1864 ? Any 
proposition to slacken the energies of those en- 
gaged in the effort to suppress the Rebellion, 
would have met a prompt and decisive rebuke by 
Congress in that session of '6:^-64 ; looking then 
to Blackstone's rule of interpretation, how is this 
law to be construed ? The object of the law in 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 265 

the mind of Congress was to regulate the fees of 
the officers of the District of Columbia and to 
hmit their compensation by the terms of the act 
of February 26th, 1853. These courts and officers 
are United States courts and officers just as much 
as the District Court of East Tennessee and the 
district attorney for East Tennessee are a United 
States court and officer; but the officers of the 
District of Columbia had been collecting fees under 
the laws of Maryland and Virginia, or both, with- 
out any limitation in the aggregate (see Brightley's 
Dig., page 236, section 3d, act of 1801), to bring 
them under the act of 1853, was the design of 
Congress. The fact that the act of the 3d of 
March, 1863, was expressly excepted from the 
operation of the act of the 26th of February, 1853, 
by the act of the 27th of June, 1864, shows that 
Congress did not intend to relax its policy to pro- 
tect the government. To prevent fraud upon the 
revenue could not have been so important in the 
mind of Congress as to preserve the life of the 
nation. In the passage of the act of the 27th of 
June, 1864, clearly the war was not in the mind 
of Congress. By the nth section of the act of 
March 3d, 1863, two per cent, on all monies real- 
ized in any suit under the revenue laws was al- 
lowed the district attorney in lieu of all other fees, 
and in terms the scale of fees and maximum of 
the act of 1853 were excluded. As the attorney 
for the District of Columbia would have revenue 
cases the exception of this act of 1863 was neces- 
23 



266 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

sary, but in June, 1864, no question had been 
made upon an account of a district attorney of an 
insurrectionary district. No construction had been 
given to the act of 1862. The eighth section of 
the act of 1862, declared ** To insure the speedy 
termination of the RebelUon, it shall be the duty 
of the President of United States to cause the 
seizure of all the estate and property, etc. , etc. , of 
the persons heretofore named, etc., for the sup- 
port of the army of the United States." Thus it 
is apparent that this policy of confiscation was 
temporary, and would cease when the Rebellion 
would be terminated. The court could only allow 
these officers such fees and charges as were reasona- 
ble and proper while the Rebellion lasted^ etc. 
Is it probable or possible that Congress intended 
to intermeddle in these matters against these 
officers of the court, while the same Congress was 
voting bounties to soldiers and giving every en- 
couragement to the uttermost exertion to suppress 
the Rebellion, then more fierce and bloody than at 
any previous time ? But what motive could have 
operated upon the mind of Congress to limit com- 
pensation to attorneys and marshals in confisca- 
tion cases ? The attorney must make seizures and 
libel at his own risk. If no condemnation fol- 
lowed and no probable cause was shown, he got 
no compensation. The marshal must take the 
property in hand and keep it, unless replevied at 
his own risk, for he stands upon the same footing as, 
the attorney. If the object of these officers was 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 26/ 

to make money, the hope of making ten thousand 
dollars per annum would quicken them in the 
proportion of six to ten. The United States could 
not suffer any loss by these allowances. They 
were paid by Rebels whom the government was 
trying to cripple in their finances that the war 
might cease. A rational motive can not be con- 
ceived to have moved Congress to limit the com- 
pensation allowed by the act of 1862, but the 
second section of the act of 1864, aforesaid, does 
not apply to confiscation cases from its very terms. 
It reads thus : * ' That no marshal or district at- 
torney of the United States shall, by reason of the 
discharge of the duties of his office, now or here- 
after, required of him by law, in any case in which 
the United States will be bound by judgment, 
which maybe rendered in the cause, etc." But 
in confiscation cases what would the United States 
be bound for, if there were no condemnation ? If 
there be condemnation, the act of 1862 greets 
the property in the United States, and the United 
States must pay its officers ; if no condemnation, 
the property remains in the original owner, and 
the allowances are by the act aforesaid, a lien in 
favor of the officers upon "probable cause" upon the 
thing seized, enforced by the decree of the court. 
If the property should in the meantime be de- 
stroyed, or the defendant be insolvent, the officers 
have no remedy, as none is provided by the act. 
Such allowances are not made to the United States 
for the benefit of the officers, but the law confers 



268 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

Upon the court the power to release the thing 
seized, upon condition that the allowances are 
paid. If, in a given case, the court should allow 
an officer one thousand dollars upon probable 
cause, and the property should be destroyed, and 
the defendant unable to pay, would the United 
States, by any law, be bound to pay that allow- 
ance? The Treasury Department would certainly 
not do it. 

It has been shown that the act of 27th of June, 
1864, has nothing in it about the war, nor about 
the act of 17th of July, 1862. The duties of dis- 
trict attorneys were the same after its passage as 
before — property must be seized and libeled ; the 
courts must decree allowances — must be made 
just as before, so that they were reasonable and 
proper, which phrases, ** reasonable " and ''prop- 
er," fixed the rule of compensation and the only 
limit. Did the act of '64 repeal this rule? If so, 
what rule was abolished? not the scale of fees of 
the act of 1853. Attorney General Bates said it 
was a new class of business and Congress had 
seen proper to put the compensation of such offi- 
cers upon a **new basis." What became of this 
basis under this act of '64 as construed by the 
United States? Did Congress mean to say in 
that act of 1864 that the attorney in Maine or 
New Hampshire should have as much as the attor- 
ney in the insurrectionary districts? No new 
class of business in the first, and red-handed war 
in the last raging fiercely at the time of its passage. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 269 

Did Congress mean to say by that act of 27th of 
June, 1864, that $6,000 (and no more) was a 
reasonable and proper allowance to the attorney 
and marshal in districts in rebellion without actual 
knowledge of the circumstances and service, not- 
withstanding the courts which knew all about it 
said it should be ;$io,ooo? Did Congress mean 
to say this as to confiscation cases, and yet in the 
same act except revenue cases, and on the 30th 
of June, 1864, three days later, by another act, de- 
clare that prize cases should not fall within the 
rule of the statute of 1853 (see 13th volume stat- 
utes at large, page) ? But observe how narrow is 
the margin upon which the United States con- 
strues this act of '64. The only words in the act 
that give the slightest color to such construction 
are the words "United States. ' ' If the act had read, 
*'No marshal or district attorney of the District 
of Columbia shall, etc.," it would have been con- 
sistent with the caption which names the marshal 
and district attorney ; and if the marshal and dis- 
trict attorney are not U. S. marshal and district 
attorney, then the act does not regulate their com- 
pensation at all, and is a departure from the cap- 
tion. Observe also the terms ''marshal" and 
''district attorney" in the act are in the singular 
number. How the words ' ' United States " got into 
the act may not be certainly known, but the pre- 
sumption is legitimate that " United States" was 
put into the clause instead of ' ' District of Colum- 
bia," either by oversight or as descriptive of the 



270 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

persons named in the caption and meaning to des- 
ignate the same officials. I conclude the argu- 
ment of this first ground of defense, viz : that there 
is no law which requires me to account for confis- 
cation allowances under the sixth, seventh and 
eighth sections of the act of 1862 ; first, by resting 
the true interpretation of that act upon the circu- 
lar letter of Attorney General Bates and the argu- 
ment now submitted, and second, that the act of 
27th of June, 1864, was intended to apply to the 
District of Columbia alone, and cannot, in the 
light of all the circumstances of time, condition 
of the country and form of the act, with the co- 
temporaneous legislation by the same Congress, be 
rationally supposed to have been intended to touch 
the act of 1862 in any of its provisions or conse- 
quences; and as it will be conceded that the con- 
fiscation allowances to defendant as district attor- 
ney in the years 1865-6-7 exceeded ;^8,ooo, it fol- 
lows that defendant is not indebted to the United 
States a dollar, as not a dollar of the ;^8,000 was 
received except from defendant by decree of the 
court upon the release of the thing seized and the 
rule of probable cause. The second ground of 
defense is that the account sued on embraces only 
three years of defendant's term instead of four of 
his actual service. Large earnings in the fourth 
year being omitted. Defendant refers to transcripts 
No. I, 2, 5 and 6 from the records, as also the 
copy of account sent to Washington and the emol- 
ument return for the fraction of the year 1869, ^^^ 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 27 1 

explain that the defendant was not called upon or 
notified to settle with the United States until Feb- 
ruary 26, 1876, nearly seven years after his term 
expired. Defendant had caused transcripts to be 
made from the records of the courts showing 
every case in which he had not received any com- 
pensation. In May, 1870, he took these tran- 
scripts to Washington to settle his account, and 
for the first time learned that the department 
would not allow him to retain confiscation allow- 
ances, and was shown the act of 1864. Defendant 
interviewed the district attorney and clerk of the 
Supreme Court of the district, examined the act 
and became satisfied it had no application to his 
account. Defendant filed two of the transcripts 
and had an account presented to the comptroller 
upon which the subordinate in his office refused to 
act. Congress had changed the time of holding 
the courts in East Tennessee in 1868, by which 
half the business of that year was thrown into the 
year 1869. Defendant's emoluments at the Janu- 
ary term, 1 869, ran up to ;^ 14, 000 to ;^ 15,000. 
Judge Nelson, deceased, prepared a memorial to 
Congress to cover the case (which memorial is 
still before Congress). This memorial was before 
Congress in May, 1870. It was then understood 
by defendant that no settlement would be made 
of his account until Congress acted on his memor- 
ial, and thus the matter stood until February, 
1876, when defendant was notified that his account 
was made out for three years showing a balance 



272 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

of;^7,097, and defendant was required to pay It. 
Defendant replied that the memorial was still be- 
fore Congress, and immediately he was sued. De- 
fendant received no answer to his letter to the 
comptroller, and without giving time to know 
what he must do he was sued. (See letter, etc.) 
The comptroller's letter bears date of February 
26, 1876, and the suit was brought March, 1876. 
After this suit was brought defendant made re- 
peated attempts to have the account modified and 
his credits allowed without success, and on the 
trial was unable to get in a dollar of his credits, 
notwithstanding the United States Attorney ad- 
mitted In open court that defendant had credits, 
but they had not been properly presented at the 
Treasury before the suit was brought, and they 
were excluded. Defendant here offers two ac- 
counts, marked Nos. i and 2, sent to Washington 
since the trial and the copy of the letter of the 
comptroller to the said district attorney since re- 
ceived, which show that defendant in any aspect 
of the law does not owe the United States anything 
like the sum claimed upon the trial. But the 
comptroller ignores in the letter all the credits 
falling within the years 1865-6-7, amounting to a 
large sum. Thus it is apparent that gross injus- 
tice will be done defendant by holding him to ac- 
count for three years of his term and ignoring the 
fourth. The third ground of defense is that cred- 
its applicable to the years 1865-6-7 excluded as 
credits but charged as debits in these years, viz: 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 273 

Acquittals by jury trials, nolle prosequis, dismiss- 
als, insolvencies and abatements. (See transcripts 
Nos. 3 and 4.) These cases were included in emol- 
ument returns for these years, but not collected or 
received by defendant. The fourth ground is that 
the United States makes defendant's emolument 
returns proof against him, but not for him. These 
emolument returns are made under oath. They 
state the gross earnings in each half year; they 
state the sums not received in each half year. 
These returns furnish the data or evidence upon 
which the account is based. Upon what principle 
of law or justice they can be used to charge and 
not to discharge prima facie, defendant cannot un- 
derstand. If a given sum is reported as earned 
and only one-half of it received the statement rests 
upon the oath of the officer and the records of the 
courts open to inspection, which are presumed to 
speak the truth, it would be easy to show how the 
facts are. 

Defendant admits the doctrine of strict account- 
ability to the government, but begs leave to demur 
to the requirement of the comptroller as the de- 
fendant understands it, that the defendant should 
state on oath each case in which he has not re- 
ceived his fee and the reason why it could not be 
collected. Defendant never did understand that 
he was required to do more than take judgment, 
see that execution was issued and property re- 
turned. The transcripts — six in number — referred 
to and now on file in Washington, show these 



274 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

things. Is defendant required to go behind the 
returns of the marshal and inquire into the pecuni- 
ary condition of every defendant in the courts, es 
pecially in view of the facts that nearly seven years 
after the expiration of defendant's term had 
elapsed before said account was presented against 
defendant? If the department had made annual 
settlements of defendant's account as the law re- 
quires and law had been insisted upon as now, 
this difficulty could not have occurred. A con- 
struction of the law in 1866, so soon after its pas- 
sage, would have been obtained and Congress 
might have explained its own meaning. At all 
events defendant would not have left under the de- 
lusion, if it was a delusion, as to how much he 
might retain. But defendant and his Honor who 
made the allowances not only thought defendant 
entitled to retain confiscation allowances, but nev- 
er heard of the claim set up under the act of 1864 
until May, 1870, more than a year after defend- 
ant's term expired, and no account was made, at 
least defendant received no notice of it, until 26th 
of February, 1876, as before stated, and then only 
for three years of defendant's term, although two 
of the transcripts, aforesaid, Nos. 3 and 4, show- 
ing credits to which defendant was entitled upon 
the account for these years, 1865-6-7, due to de- 
fendant, and an account had been made from them 
in 1870 and verified by defendant's aflfidavit, yet 
no notice was taken of them ; so that the court 
erred upon the trial in not allowing these credits, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2/5 

for they had been presented to the department. 
By the eighteenth section of the act of 26th of 
February, 1853, it is provided that every such 
officer (attorney or marshall) shall with each such 
return (emolument returns) made by him pay into 
the Treasury of the United States, or deposit to 
the credit of the Treasury thereof, as he may be 
directed by the Secretary of the Interior, any sur- 
plus of the fees and emoluments of his office which 
his half yearly returns so made, as aforesaid, shall 
show to exist, etc. , and in every case where the 
returns of such officers shall show that a surplus 
may exist, the said Secretary of the Interior shall 
cause said returns to be carefully examined and an 
account opened with said officer, etc., and the al- 
lowance for personal compensation for each calen- 
dar year shall be made from the fees and emolu- 
ments of that year, etc. It is clear under these 
provisions a practical settlement of account is re- 
quired at the close of each half year if there be 
a surplus of emoluments. Defendant respectfully 
asks if this act of 1864 was understood to apply, 
as now claimed, in 1865-5-7, ^hy was not an 
order made upon defendant to pay these excesses 
at the close of each half year, or at the close of 
each year, at least? It is true the defendant was 
not drawing money from the Treasury except the 
little salary and his per diem and ;^ 100 in the Chat- 
tanooga Cemetery case, but every dollar earned 
or received was reported at the close of each half 
year, and if the account required by the law, 



276 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

aforesaid, was kept, these excesses or surpluses 
were known to the department. Under the be- 
Hef that defendant was entitled to all emoluments 
in confiscation cases he certainly would not think 
of any duty on his part to make deposits, and he 
was not required to do so by the Secretary of the 
Interior, as he must have been to have known 
how to make said deposits. If defendant had 
known that he could have made out an account 
against the United States at the close of each half 
year for all his fees and emoluments, and had the 
money paid him from the Treasury, he would cer- 
tainly most willingly have done so; but defendant 
was attorney for the district in 1841 and then 
acted under the practice in the State as to fees, and 
not seeing anything in the act of 1853 authorizing 
the payment of fees, otherwise defendant acted in 
1865 and through his term as he had done in 1841, 
and waited until the monies were paid into court 
for his compensation and drew them from the 
court. Again it is shown by defendant's emolu- 
ment returns for the half year 1868 that there 
were $1,144 ^^^ received, and by the returns for 
the last half of that year that defendant had re- 
ceived of that sum $2g2, leaving ;^ 1,108 not re- 
ceived in that year; yet this is wholly omitted in 
the account sued on. Can the United States 
make an account after the expiration of defend- 
ant's whole term and ignore more than a fourth of 
it? These emolument returns for 1868 were made 
ifii- due time and were in the department. No 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2/7 

emolument returns were made for the half year of 
1869, because the January term was so volumin- 
ous it was impossible to get the data in form to 
make it before defendant's term expired, and the 
transcripts referred to were made out for a full set- 
tlement. 

In conclusion, first, I insist that the judge who 
tried the cause mistook the meaning of the law 
and ruled contrary to it, for all the reasons stated. 
Second, That defendant does not owe the United 
States anything; but in any aspect of the law the 
account sued on and the action of the court upon 
it are erroneous for the various reasons assigned. 
Defendant held the office four years, earned up- 
wards of ;^40,ooo, received a little over ^18,000, 
was entitled to retain for his own compensation 
even by the act of 1853 ^24,000. The United 
States say defendant received ;^24,2I2. If the 
;^24,ooo had been distributed into the four years, 
as might have been done without any wrong or 
lack of duty, it would have been all right under 
the act of 1853; but it was not for two reasons: 
First, Defendant believed, and still believes, that 
he was entitled to all confiscation allowances under 
the act of 1862, and second, because Congress 
changed the terms of court in 1868 and cut off one 
term of that year, throwing the business that 
would have been done in November, 1868, over 
to January, 1869, when defendant's emoluments 
ran up to some ^14,000, and this was the cause of 
the memorial to Congress. If defendant mistook 



278 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

the law, it was his misfortune ; if the authorities at 
Washington knew the law they should have 
brought it to the attention of the defendant by an 
order to pay over surplus. Failing to do this, 
and springing this suit upon the defendant so 
stated, defendant is involved in the charge of re- 
taining money which did not belong to him. The 
rule of the common law is, ''The king can do no 
wrong." How far this principle should be ap- 
plied in a republic may be debated; but natural 
justice must recognize the rule that the failure of 
duty by a superior officer which involves the duty 
of a subordinate must wholly excuse the latter, or 
greatly modify his blameworthiness, according to 
circumstances. But if the argument herein pre- 
sented be sound, the idea that the Secretary of 
the Interior omitted his duty is excluded. He 
doubtless acted under the construction of the act 
i/tb of July, 1862, and that of 27th of June, 1864, 
in this brief stated, and directly under the inter- 
pretation of the first named act given by Attorney 
General Bates, January, 1863. Finally, defendant 
submits that a new trial should be granted, first, 
because the court mistook the law of the case in 
construing the act of the 27th of June, 1864, as 
referring to the eighth section of the act of the 
17th of July, 1862; second, in refusing to allow 
evidence of defendant's credits to go to the jury, 
an account for some of them having been offered 
to the department; third, in holding and instruct- 
ing the jury that the United States may make and 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2/9 

collect an account against an officer for part of his 
term of office after his whole term has expired 
and seven years' delay, and no former account 
rendered nor demand made upon such officer to 
settle accounts; fourlji, that emolument returns of 
an officer are evidence for the United States, but 
not for the officer, to charge but not discharge 
him ; fifth, because the Comptroller of the Treasu- 
ry admits defendant is entitled to credits for the 
portion of the year 1869, but does not allow de- 
fendant any credit for sums charged against him, 
but not received, or sums taxed against the 
United States in the cases of acquittals by jury 
trials, nolle prosequis, dismissals, abatements 
and insolvencies in the years 1865-6-7; sixth, be- 
cause no fair trial of the case was had, for though 
the district attorney objected to evidence of de- 
fendant's credits, yet, at the same time, admitted 
that defendant had credits which he must assert 
in the Claims, thus springing the suit upon de- 
fendant and then relying upon it to cut off the 
credits (see afft.) ; seventh, in refusing the motion 
made by defendant to allow him to file a plea 
of set off upon the ground that defendant could 
have the full benefit of it under the general issue, 
to which defendant excepted. 

Lawyers are apt to regard their presentation of 
a case as strong if not conclusive. In the present 
case the lawyer submits the facts and law present- 
ed to the impartial and candid judgment of the in- 
telligent reader, and feels assured that it will at least 



28 J THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

justify the remark o^ the judge who tried the cause, 
"Hon. Connelly F. Trigg, that it was a case which 
should go to the Supreme Court of the United 
States, and was not taken for the reason stated, 
viz : the discharge of the rule for a new trial was 
not known until the elapse of a month, when it 
was too late to pray an appeal or file a bill of ex- 
ception. A story is told of a man who burned 
the temple of a heathen god. Being arrested for 
the crime, an unusual punishment was inflicted. 
Under a towering cliff on the sea shore he was 
chained to a rock. At the topmost verge of the 
cliff a massive stone was placed on a pivot and im- 
mediately over his head, so that the slightest force 
applied would whelm the victim to its crushing 
fall ; and thus he remained from day to day in a 
suspense worse than death itself. There are some 
points of difference in this case and that of the law- 
yer's. The crime of the latter is not capital, nor 
can the judgment be satisfied because the govern- 
ment has left the lawyer too poor, but those who 
would take such a judgment as that against the 
lawyer would take the last night-cap in the ward- 
robe if one could be found and the law would 
permit. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 28 1 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

The legislative department of the government 
passes laws and the executive department con- 
strues them and prescribes rules and regulations 
as they choose. In some cases the courts may 
be applied to, and some laws are interpreted by 
them which the executive must respect. But 
there are instances in which the executive depart- 
ment claims authority paramount to the courts. 
One such instance occurred in the lawyer's experi- 
ence. He had become security for two men for 
a bond of ;^ 10,000. The men forfeited the condi- 
tion of the bond and became liable for the penalty. 
The lawyer was sued upon the bond as security 
and had to pay a large sum. Forthwith he took 
judgment over against his principals. One of 
them had a claim against the United States for 
property lost in the war, for which a warrant was 
issued and sent to a claim agent for the benefit of 
the claimant. Upon being informed of these 
facts the lawyer filed a bill in the Chancery Court 
and attached the warrant in the hands of the 
agent, making him and the claimant parties. The 
case was heard, a decree pronounced and the war- 
rant subjected to the lawyer's debt. The agent 
was appointed receiver, with power to collect the 
24 



282 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

debt, which, with a copy of the proceedings, were 
sent to Washington and payment demanded. 
Such payment was suspended for more than a 
year and finally refused upon the ground that no 
Federal or State court had any right to interpose 
between the United States and its creditors, so 
that the lawyer got nothing by his bill. But dis- 
appointment in such matters from that quarter 
had become the rule and not the exception, and 
the debt was lost. (The synopsis of the opinion 
delivered by the comptroller, the reasoning of 
which is not at all satisfactory to the lawyer's 
mind.) 

Treasury Department of the United States, ^ 

Division of Wm. Lawrence, V 

First Comptroller of the Treasury. j 

In the matter of the payment of a Treasury draft: 
First. The Legislative, Executive and Judicial 
departments of the government are, respectively, 
as to all powers, exclusively conferred upon each 
independent of the others. Hence, a power ex- 
clusively vested in an executive officer can be ex- 
ecuted by him only, and no other department or 
officer of the government can interfere with, de- 
termine or change the manner or result of its ex- 
ercise. 

Second. The accounting officers of the Treasury 
Department are charged with the duty generally 
of ascertaining all sums due to creditors of the 
government, and these may be paid by drafts 
drawn by the Treasurer on the Treasury or a de- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 283 

positary. No court can interfere with or control 
the accounting officers in determining who are 
creditors, the amounts due or to whom payable. 

Third. The statute requires the Treasurer or de- 
positary on which drafts are drawn to pay the 
same to the payee or indorser. Hence, no court 
can by any process or proceeding require payment 
to be made to or for a creditor of the lawful holder 
of such draft or otherwise interfere with the pay- 
ment to such holder. 

Fourth. The decree of a court appointing a re- 
ceiver with power to endorse and collect such 
draft for the benefit of a judgment creditor of the 
holder thereof, is in contravention of the statute 
and void. 

Fifth. It is competent for Congress to entrust 
to the judiciary the determination of questions af- 
fecting the rights of parties except as to matters 
over which the Constitution has given executive 
officers exclusive authority. 

Sixth. The sovereignty of the United States 
and the authority of a State are distinct and inde- 
pendent of each other. 

Seventh. Hence, the government of the United 
States has the exclusive authority to pay its own 
creditors in such manner as it may determine ; and 
no State court or other State authority can inter- 
fere with the manner of payment or divert the 
payment from the payee designated by the laws 
of the United States. 

Eighth. A draft drawn by the Treasurer of the 



284 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

United States on a depositary transfers no title to 
any specific money until paid. Hence, such draft 
is not property in the sense that it is subject to the 
control of courts. 

Ninth. An executive officer charged with the 
duty of ascertaining who are public creditors and 
the amounts due them cannot delegate that duty 
to a court or other tribunal or person. 

Tenth. The duty of disbursing officers of the 
United States prescribed by statute to pay drafts 
to designated persons cannot be diverted by any 
court, national or State. 

Eleventh. How far courts may appoint receivers 
or grant injunctions, and prescribe duties or deter- 
mine rights, or control conduct of claimants not 
affecting the adjudication or payment of claims or 
drafts by executive officers it is not the province 
of executive officers to decide. 

Twelfth. There may be transfers of drafts by 
operation of law. 

In the lawyer's early observation in the courts 
he knew two old lawyers who were often found on 
opposite sides of a cause. Both were quick-tem- 
pered and tenacious of their opinions, and as 
pugilism in those days was regarded as not very 
unwholesome exercise and an entertaining pastime 
to spectators, they frequently used upon each oth- 
er (as another old man used to say) arguments 
about the size of a man's fist. They were equally 
plucky, but one was the physical superior in the 
rough-and-tumble ; therefore, in their competitive 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 285 

efforts he had the advantage, but the weaker 
beUigerant was always ready to try it over again. 
*'Yes," said the victor, "I keep him to whip, 
whenever I want to whip somebody." The law- 
yer in his tournament with the quill and red tape 
came to the conclusion he was kept for a like pur- 
pose, and, as a consequence, has reached the fol- 
lowing resolutions. 

First, That the United States is richer, and 
therefore stronger than the lawyer. 

Second, That accounts with the government 
may be so manipulated that a small servant of the 
government may earn ^40,000 and be forced to 
put up with the fourth ot that sum as per agree- 
ment. Thus, $40,000' earned, ;^ 18, 000 received, 
;^7,ooo required to be returned, leaving $10,000 
out of the $40,000 earned; or taking the account 
as stated by the government: $24,000 earned, 
$17,000 allowed as compensation, $18,000 received, 
and $8,000 of that sum to be restored, leaving 
$10,000 out of the $24,000. But $18,000 was not 
received within the three years covering the 
$24,000 charged, so that taking the account for 
three years only as $24,000 earned, the sum re- 
ceived being less than $i8,ooo, it is the sum of 

$ from which $8,000 must be taken by the 

judgment, which would leave the real amount of 
compensation according to the account of the sum 

of $ ; so that out of gross earnings of $40,000 

the lawyer practically gets less than $10,000. His 
memorial is still before Congress, but as he expects 



286 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

little he does not fear to be disappointed. The 
lawyer, therefore, makes his bow to the great re- 
public (the so-called pater patrici) and retires in 
disgust with himself for having been so long upon 
a fool's errand. 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 28/ 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

In the olden time the bar and bench of Tennes- 
see were distinguished for strong- common sense 
and honest motives. They were pioneers in the 
profession and organizers of Tennessee juris- 
prudence — free from the corrupt influences of a 
depraved civiHzation. Their virgin sod and prim- 
itive mode of hfe evolved simple laws and honest 
interpretations. ''Their eloquence was born of 
the storm clouds which rent their mountains or 
swept their valleys, or torrents plunging from pre- 
cipitous rocks into subterranean pathways to 
spring forth at some distant place into floods of 
pure waters. The true definition of eloquence is the \ 

power of expr.ession in speech. Not the smooth- 
tongued oratory which covers the thought with 
roses of rhetoric so that the sound leaves no sense 
behind it, but the simplicity of truth and fact ut- 
tered in words expressive of the convictions of the 
heart. More modern elocutionists may have been 
successful in mere word painting, and in light 
forensic skirmish show sharp wit and ready repartee, 
yet the maul and wedge of the olden time sundered 
truth and errror, right and wrong, with a force that 
only the brawn and muscle of such minds could 
exert. Good laws are the legitimate fruit of prin- 



288 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

ciples which spring from nature, and nature's God. 
''Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy 
throne: mercy and truth shall go before thy 
face." The eternal principles of right and wrong, 
good and evil, never change, nor can ever be 
destroyed. However, they are fearfully besmeared 
with the filth of human depravity. Modern civ- 
ilization gives polish to the manners, but leaves 
the matter of human opinion and action depreci- 
ated by the substitution of show and sound for 
sense and substance. The pioneer in every de- 
partment rough hews the primitive substance, and 
more delicate and effeminate hands and minds add 
the dressing ; and the dressing is often not an im- 
provement, but a distortion of the original, and 
not creditable to the dresser. This would be a 
curious and interesting speculation to contrast the 
simple, straightforward utterances of the bench of 
the olden time and the wordy, tortuous metaphys- 
ics of modern judicial opinions. If we have not al- 
ready reached the point, we certainly soon will, when 
such metaphysics will be employed to shut out 
truth and right and put wrong in their places. 
That there is decadence in simple dignity and 
X love of truth and justice in official life, whether 
political or judicial, cannot be truthfully denied. 
Forty years ago a chancery judge would not tol- 
erate an argument which did not discuss the ques- 
tion involved, and yet would show such considera- 
tion for the solicitor and his client as to give no 
offense to either. The lawyer himself has wit- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 289 

nessed the sense of truth and fairness in the heart 
of the judge when, upon the discovery of an at- 
tempt at advantage by one party on account of 
the absence of proof of a particular fact known to 
the party making the objection, the judge prompt- 
ly required such party to state how the fact was, 
and the objection was withdrawn. 

In the Supreme Court of Tennessee, in the olden 
time, a distinguished lawyer pronounced an opin- 
ion in a given case, and inadvertently overlooked 
a single point in the case. When the opinion had 
been announced the solicitor of the losing party 
arose in the bar and respectfully suggested the 
omission of that point. The honest and noble- 
minded judge immediately withdrew the opinion 
for further consideration. How would such a 
case be treated now? The modern lawyer's ex- 
perience upon that subject is somewhat different. 
An honorable LL. D. , or a modern chancellor would 
answer, *'The case is decided," or, *'We hold 
against you in that point;" and instead of forcing 
a party to tell the simple truth, would lug into the 
case rejected depositions admitted not to be proof, 
but to be looked to as corroborative of some other 
statement just as false, and eventually decide a 
case upon assumed ''probable equities." The 
contrast will be sufficiently clear by the statement 
of a modern case in our high courts. Two female 
children of a deceased father were entitled to a 
share in their grandfather's lands. Petition was 
made, and to equalize the shares, as was said, that 
25 



290 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

of the children was charged with a sum equal to 
half the value of the share. These infant girls had 
a guardian, but no means to pay this charge upon 
their share. To discharge this lien, therefore, the 
guardian filed his bill in chancery to sell their 
share of the land. It was sold and the sale money 
brought into court, paid over to the clerk, the lien 
on the land paid off, the cost and solicitor's fee 
paid, leaving a few hundred dollars in the hands 
of the clerk for the children. The guardian did 
not draw the sum from the clerk. The clerk 
placed the money in bank, but without any order 
from the court or guardian to do so. The bank 
and deposits went on an excursion down into 
Dixie and got tangled in the brush and bogs of 
Isham G. Harris's portable sovereignty. After 
the girls got old enough to understand they had 
some rights, an attorney ^yas employed. He 
found the clerk in office and the guardian still 
alive. The only answer to the attorney's inquiry 
was that the bank took off the money and there is 
no fund to pay the claim. If an order of the 
court had been made upon the clerk to pay over 
the money it would have been met precisely as it 
was in his answer — that the money had been taken 
off by the bank and there was no fund in court. 
The attorney thought the guardian should be liable 
upon the well settled principles (applicable to ex- 
ecutors and administrators) of liability for all mon- 
ies which came, or with reasonable diligence might 
have come, into his hand. He filed a bill against 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 2gl 

the guardian and the clerk in the name of a next 
friend. There was no contests over the facts. 
The chancellor held the guardian not bound be- 
cause there was no order of the court to pay out 
the money to him, and this in the face of the fact 
that the guardian had filed the bill to sell, and had 
an order made to pay the lien upon the share, the 
solicitor's fees and costs of the cause. His plain 
duty was as that of the solicitor to see that the 
money was paid over to the guardian for the ben- 
efit of his wards, as while it remained in the hands 
of the clerk it drew no interest and was a dead 
fund. As to the clerk, the opinion was reserved 
to await the result of a suit against the bank to re- 
cover the assets. The case against the guardian 
was appealed, and as the fund had gone down in- 
to Dixie, the sympathizing Supreme Court affirmed 
the chancellor's decree. After long delay the suit 
against the bank was decided in favor of depositors, 
and a new chancellor having been installed, he 
rendered a decree against the clerk for the fund 
and interest. No appeal was taken by the clerk, 
and not long afterwards the clerk died and the ad- 
ministration upon the estate was granted to his 
son, who sued out a writ of error to the Supreme 
Court. In that court the only LL. D. on the bench 
presiding said, ** Reverse the decree." If the 
other judges said anything or knew anything of 
the case, or approved or disapproved of the action 
of the presiding judge, except as here stated, the 
same has not transpired. And thus by a sort of 



292 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

grasshopper-jumps, these children have lost their 
little patrimony, and their security the costs of 
the entire case. It is due to other members of 
the court that they are not held responsible for 
the results, as the papers were not in the hands of 
the court, except as in open court, and no consul- 
tation was understood to have taken place. A 
Haywood, a Nathan Green, a Robert Caruthers 
or R. J. McKinney would scarcely have decided 
a case of that character in that manner. 

The Savior said to the Pharisee, "Ye blind 
guides which strain at a gnat and swallow a 
camel." Whether this has a truth in it applicable 
by easy reference in this connection is submitted 
with the remark that to tithe mint, anise, and 
cummin, and omit the weightier matters of the 
law — ^judgment and mercy — are not commendable 
in religion or law, and sooner or later will bear 
bitter fruits. The real trouble is, the judiciary 
has been degraded to the political standard. In 
the olden time judges were elected by the Legis- 
lature ; by one hundred electors instead of more 
than one hundred thousand. In the former mode 
responsibility was fastened on a few persons who 
could be held accountable for their actions by 
name, and as all honest and intelligent citizens 
agreed that the best talent, learning and moral 
character should be placed in such offices, such 
would be the general result in glaring contrast 
with the present system. A canvass for judicial 
office differs little now from a mere party scram- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 293 

ble, and it is feared much the same means are 
employed in securing judicial and political offices. 
Money and promises of place when employed are 
potent factors in all such contests. The observa- 
tion and experience of thoughtful minds strongly 
incline to the belief that the nearer the laws and 
public institutions of the country are brought un- 
der the direction of the masses, the more certain 
the demoralization and the tendency to disregard 
moral and legal duty. Even that time-honored 
institution, the boasted bulwark of individual right 
and public safety, the trial by jury, under the 
present order of things has become the lawyer's 
instrument to deprive an honest man of his prop- 
erty and to open a back-door for the escape of 
criminals in many instances. 



294 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

Solomon, the king of Israel, was a great states- 
man and a wise ruler. The Jews, though greatly 
degenerated from the times of Moses, and Joshua, 
were still the objects of divine favor. The revolu- 
tion which placed David on the throne was a 
special Providence to inaugurate the splendid 
epoch of Solomon's reign and the building of the 
temple; but glorious as was the kingdom of Israel 
through the greater part of his reign, yet his sun 
sat under a cloud and the kingdom went to pieces 
upon his death. This case furnishes the best 
parallel to all national declination, because of the 
peculiar instruction and privileges which the Jews 
enjoyed. If this most favored nation did not ap- 
preciate its blessings and improve its opportuni- 
ties to perpetuate its institution and make per- 
manent its national power and glory, then nations 
less favored than this was, with the highest material 
and spiritual advantages can not be expected to 
preserve their national integrity or permanent free 
government. What then of our great republic ? 
The Jews were brought out of Egypt from a most 
grievous physical bondage. The Pilgrim Fathers 
fled from spiritual oppression. The Jews pre- 
served their religion and their simple theocratic in- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 295 

stitutions for a time, but waxing numerous and 
rich they gradually lost their love for simple equal- 
ity under divine government and desired a king. 
Does not the history of the world demonstrate the 
fact that as nations become populous and wealthy, 
the natural depravity of man becomes more fully 
developed, until its licentiousness can only be re- 
strained by physical force ? Our republic has 
lived a century, how much longer will it live ? Its 
present outlook does not promise great longivity. 
The chief danger does not lie so much in the open 
vices of communism — infidelity of the Ingersoll type, 
Roman Catholicism or any false religion palpably 
hostile to the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures, 
baneful as such vices are to that Repubhcism born 
of religious oppression, whose chief corner-stone 
is Protestantism — but in the depravity between 
the great multiplication of our people and the in- 
crease of our wealth and power as a nation on the 
one hand, and the comparatively small amount of 
that practical, heart-moving and life governing 
Christianity, expressed in the phrase (godliness), 
''The form of religion without the power." The 
President of the republic goes to church on* Sun- 
day morning, when not otherwise engaged, and to 
the theater as well. Each house of Congress opens 
its sessions with prayer by the chaplain and the 
members too generally smoke cigars, drink whis- 
ky and make speeches for notoriety and popular 
favor. Splendid temples are built at immense 
costs and dedicated in solemn form to the worship 



296 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

of the true God, and the gUtter of wealth and 
fashion throng them to sit on silken cushions and 
enjoy waking dreams under the deep, dulcet tones 
of the organ, or the silvery sounds of enchanting 
oratory, while the poor and rough-clad glance a 
wistful eye upon the pageant and pass on saying : 
** It's no place for me." Large assemblies, associa- 
tions, conferences and councils meet to conserve 
the interest of their denominations ; they pray, 
some talk a great deal and go on excursions oc- 
casionally, but very rarely do the reports announce 
the glad news of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, 
the awakening and conversion of souls as the re- 
suit of such gatherings of Christian forces. The 
Christian minister, salaried at three, five or ten 
thousand a year, becomes so worn with his heavy 
charge, his people think he must have a vacation, 
and he sails on railroads to inhale the sea breeze 
or mountain air for weeks or months at the very 
time when old people and children can best at- 
tend upon divine worship in the sanctuary. Then 
sums are gathered for the evangelization of our 
own land and to spread over the dark continents 
the knowledge of the true God and his Son in hu- 
man nature — the only Savior of the world, and 
missionaries are devoting themselves to the great 
work at home and abroad, with consecration and 
self-denial, which will, in the great eternity give 
them a reward suitable to the munificence of the 
Prince they now serve. But what proportion is 
there between their labors and sacrifices and the 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 29/ 

monies thrown into the Lord's treasury and the 
souls saved ? What has become of the disciphne 
of the Church ? May the church-members practice 
the vices of the worldly with impunity. How 
much private, social and public prayer reaches the 
heart of Christ and invokes the Holy Spirit's power, 
and when men are to be elected to fill responsible 
public trusts, where is the Church found? How 
many Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Luther- 
ans, Presbyterians and other denominations are 
there in the most cultivated and favored districts 
of the nation, and how many men are in Congress, 
or State Legislatures, or judicial offices, whose 
lives attest their love of virtue and obedience to 
divine law ? Now let this panorama of human life 
be closely studied, look through the lights and 
under the shadows and forecast coming events. 
Ignorance and unbelief of divine revelation are the 
servants of the devil. Vain is the talk about the 
necessity of education and the appropriation of 
public money to that object by men of the world. 
The unclean spirit goes out under the pretense of 
making men wise and makes them tenfold more 
ienorant of true wisdom. The seven thousand 
whose purity of life and acceptable prayer pre- 
serves the nation now from moral and physical 
putrefaction, stand upon the only ground of in- 
dividual or national safety, faith and trust in God 
and hearty obedience to his revealed will. Indi- 
vidual lives aggregated make national life. Many a 
single life casts its mite or its monument into the 



298 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

life of the nation. Individual man, what is your 
character ? Your reputation is a different thing. 
The world probably holds you in high esteem ; 
for what ? For your money, for your suaviter of 
manner, or your eloquence, or your political 
prominence, or other kindred qualifications ? The 
question still is : What is your character ? It is 
not generally on the surface. Its home is in the 
heart. Overt acts are not needful. Out of the 
heart proceed evil thoughts — murders, adulteries, 
fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies, 
envy, hatred, covetousness, pride. If any, or all 
of these are in the heart, however restrained by 
fear or shame or worldly policy, they stamp your 
character. On the other hand, if your heart is 
set upon things that are honest things, that are 
just things, that are pure things, that are lovely 
things, that are of good report, these mark your 
character. Though the world may not know it, 
for the highest virtues are often least showy. Con- 
science is the sentinel between the faculties of the 
mind and the emotions of the heart. Let it speak 
out and every man will know himself. The Bible 
represents the natural heart by the figure of the 
cage of unclean birds, deceitful above all things, 
inclined to evil continually and desperately wicked. 
Then, oh man ! if you are not a Christian, what are 
you? Whither are you going? Shall the evil 
thoughts and the long and dark train, which fol- 
low as a troop, occupy your mind and fill your 
heart forever? If so, you are lost. Gambetta, 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 299 

the great and distinguished Frenchman is dead ; 
died in the strength of his manhood and maturity 
of his powers and fame. Amongst his last as- 
surances were these words: "I am lost, 'tis useless 
to disguise it." He was the idol of the French 
republic, but the enemy of God. Are you God's 
enemy? Think of this. Are the masses of the 
American people God's enemies ? If they con- 
tinue to be, what will become of the nation ? Study 
Jewish history and supplement it with that of all 
other nations, and you will have the answer with 
mathematical exactness. Man, do you desire to 
be happy? then seek to be virtuous, not merely 
worldly, morally, but that virtue which is formu- 
lated in the precept: ''Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as 
thyself" — the central force of which is love and 
without it you can not be happy. La Place said 
to Segwick, of Cambridge, "I have lived long 
enough to know what I did not at one time be- 
lieve, that no society can be upheld in happiness 
and honor without the sentiments of religion," 
and the man of threescore years and ten, testifies 
that he has never known an irreligious happy man. 
A millionaire and a man of a hundred and fifty 
thousand met in New York. The latter said to the 
former: ''You sir, must be a very happy man. " 
"Why?" said the millionaire. The other an- 
swered: "Your immense wealth gives you all 
you can need or wish." "How much are you 
worth?" asked the millionaire. The other replied: 



300 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

" About one hundred and fifty thousand dollars." 
''Well, you can buy all you need," said the mil- 
lionaire. "What more can I do? You, sir, can be 
as happy as if you were rich." Were either of 
these men happy? No. Why? Because it is 
impossible that any possessions, intellectual or 
material, which begin and terminate in self and do 
not reach to that eternity for which the soul of 
man was made, can satisfy that soul. 

Dr. Upham tells the story of an interview be- 
tween a great divine and a poor beggar. The 
divine saluted the beggar: **God give you a good 
day, my friend. " The beggar answered: "Sir, I 
do not remember that I ever had an evil day. 
When I hunger, I praise God. If it rain, hail, 
snow or freeze, if it be fair, or foul, if I am de- 
spised, or ill-used, I return God thanks. I have 
learned to resign myself to his will, being very cer- 
tain that all his works are good, therefore I never 
desire anything out of the good pleasure of God." 
The divine asked him "When he found God?" 
He replied : "I found him when I renounced all 
the creatures. " And where did you leave him?'' 
asked the divine. He replied: "With the poor 
in spirit, the pure in heart, and men of charity." 
"Who are you?" said the divine. " I am a king," 
said the beggar. "Where is your kingdom?'' 
said the divine. The beggar answered : "In my 
soul. I have learned to bring into subjection and to 
govern my senses, as well outward as inward with 
my affections and passions, which kingdom is un- 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 301 

doubtedly superior to all the kingdoms of this 
world. " The divine asked him : ' ' By what means 
he had attained this state ?" He answered : '' By 
silence, watchfulness, meditation and prayers. I 
could find no sure repose or comfort in any creature 
in the world ; by means thereof I found out my 
God, who will comfort the world without end." 
This is just the state which every human soul 
should desire to attain, for there is no real perma- 
nent rest to the soul in anything short of a full 
and entire consecration to the will and service of 
the Lord Jesus Christ. No compromise with the 
world or divided service, part to the master, or 
part to the great enemy of souls, can result in any- 
thing but unrest and very limited usefulness. 
And here is doubtless the explanation of the dis- 
proportion between the multitude of professing 
Christians and the monies contributed to spread 
the gospel, and the number of those who give 
satisfactory evidence that they are saved. The 
distinction between saints and sinners should be as 
clearly shown in actual life as that of two opposing 
parties on a battle-field. The Christian life is a 
warfare ; his enemies are the world, flesh and the 
devil ; the earth is the Lord's, but the devil has 
made insurrection on it, and the rightful sovereign 
has come to recover possessions of his own. Who 
are on the Lord's side? — those only who have con- 
secrated themselves to fight his battles and win 
victories for him — no traitor or deserter is. If all 
professing Christians were of this kind, the king- 



302 THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 

dom of darkness would be overthrown, for if only 
two or three unite to ask anything according to his 
will, it will be granted surely ; the prayers of the 
whole Church would not be disregarded. Spirit- 
ual light would break over the continents with the 
glory of a noonday sun and the song of peace on 
earth and good will to man, would be the refrain 
of earth to the anthem of the heavenly chorus at 
the Savior's birth. The old man standing on the 
shores of time and looking into the unbounded 
space beyond, and assured he must appear 
in the judgment hall of the universe at no dis- 
tant day, where his true character will be revealed 
and his indefinite future fixed, is earnest to know 
himself now. It is a matter of small concern what 
the world thinks of him, except as his reputation 
affects his influence for good or evil. The closest 
scrutiny of his past life discloses nothing which 
meets the unqualified approval of his own con- 
science; all he can say is: *'The blood of Jesus 
Christ cleanseth from all sin," and with the publi- 
can: ** God be merciful to me a sinner," and " I 
trust I have believed, and am persuaded that he is 
able to keep that which I have committed to him 
against that day." Reader, there is no bridge over 
the river of death, nor is there any Savior on this 
side or that but the Lord Jesus Christ. Commit 
your soul to him now. Serve him now. The to- 
morrow never comes. Do not copy the follies of 
the old man's youth, or the positive wrongs and 



THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN. 303 

omissions of duty of his mature life. Beware, 
your sin will find you out. 

The only man whose life will not be a failure is 
he, who, from infancy to death, consecrates all his 
powers to the service of God and man ; such only 
can attain the highest reward. 

THE END. 



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